This course examines the formation, character, and fall of ancient empires through an archaeological lens. Among the topics covered are militarism, urbanism, representations of power and state ideology, provincial life, infrastructure, social and ethnic relations, and economic interactions. The course is comparative, drawing from both Old World and New World empires. The Archaeology of Empires (G6060) will provide intensive reading on the archaeology of these empires, with the occasional addition of 16th century Vijayanagara, India. It is expected that students taking the course will have a certain familiarity with ancient empires and thus will be extending the depth of their studies through comparison with regions with which they are not familiar, since archaeological study often grants a markedly different view of the nature of life and power relations than does documentary evidence. As there is an immense literature on the archaeology of empires, the class discussions will only be able to draw selectively from the literature on specific topics. The course will be built around case study comparisons, based on the core literature included in the attached syllabus. An additional bibliography of some 3,000 works on these empires will also be made available. The course takes the perspective that empires are better understood as intersecting networks of power than as well-ordered polities. They are characterized by a host of interests, some constituted as formal institutions and some as ephemeral coalitions that pass as conditions change. A great deal of the literature on ancient empires is concerned with royalty and the practice of power at a grand scale. The complexity of the ethnic, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic composition of empires implies, however, that the local effects of imperial expansion will vary substantially with respect to both the incorporated peoples and the front line members of the expansionist polities. As a result, the imperial presence appears quite different depending on where one looks for evidence. Balanced study of the early empires must thus concern both the grand and the quotidian, since the nature of life for a vast proportion of imperial subjects revolved around family, kin, and making a living. The latter are hardly the stuff of monumental inscriptions, but their consequences produced the bulk of the material record in the societies that we study. The topics that have been chosen for the course thus attempt to provide a representative cross-section of life in ancient empires through case studies that draw attention to the evidentiary basis for our analysis of the polities discussed here. The readings underscore that our analyses depend on intersecting lines of evidence from different sources - historical, monumental, dynastic, numismatic, and archaeological. Through readings an discussions, the students will have the opportunity to think about how we can effectively study the most expansive of the ancient polities through the conjunction of different sources of information. The scope of the literature and the polities themselves makes comparative analysis a daunting task, but too frequently students and researchers working in one empire or another work in a self-referential context. The premise underlying this course is that we can better explain the nature and trajectory of any given empire through comparative study, so that we understand what is historically contingent, idiosyncratic to a given empire, or a product of circumstances common to expansionist polities. The attached syllabus contains 18 topics that potentially can be covered in the course. The intent is to treat 13 of the topics and two or three cases (e.g., Rome, Aztecs, Inkas) per topic, the choice depending on the interests and backgrounds of the students. |