Network approaches in archaeology offer a promising avenue for facilitating bottom-up, comparative approaches to sociopolitical organization. While recent applications have focused primarily on migration and demographic trends, identity and identity politics, and the dynamics of geopolitical and regional interaction, little in the way of comparative sociopolitical organization has been attempted. In this study, I present an alternative approach to the use of sociotypological models across southern Appalachia. In particular, I demonstrate the value in employing network analyses as a mode of formally and quantitatively comparing the relational structures and organizations of sociopolitical landscapes; in this case, those traditionally characterized as constellations of chiefdoms. By approaching southern Appalachian histories through the relationships upon which social, political, and economic institutions were actually built, I move the study of southeastern political systems beyond the use of models that emphasize the behaviors of elites and the ruling class as inspired by the ethnographic and ethnohistoric records. To these ends, using a robust regional ceramic dataset, I compare network histories and political landscapes for the southern Appalachian region between ca. AD 800 and 1650. The results of these analyses contribute insights to the study of small-scale political organizations by demonstrating that (
This content will become publicly available on December 2, 2025
Emergent scholarship in political geology highlights multiple ways of knowing the earth and its materials. By examining the politics of Western knowledge production within the earth sciences, political geology queries who has the power to define geomaterials and the sociopolitical impacts of such categorizations. Simultaneously, political geology demonstrates how earthly formations cocreate politics alongside humans through their vibrancy, with societies and geomaterials transforming each other. Here, I develop a political geology of archaeological ceramics to move beyond Western categories that can sometimes hinder interpretations of politics due to their rigidity. I use the concept of geopower—how earthly forces engender new collectivities and political possibilities—to overcome the interpretative challenges archaeologists face when describing Recuay sociopolitical organization (Ancash, Peru, ca. 100–700 CE). Specifically, I show how so‐called “impure” kaolin helped to temporarily organize otherwise insular villages through their emergence and meaningful position on the landscape. To recognize geopower in the deep past, I present a layered narrative framework that blends interpretations of earthly materials, thereby making space for the existence of many worlds. In this sense, political geology can learn from archaeology, particularly Indigenous archaeologies, which advocate for the integration of myriad knowledges of the earth and its histories.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10558059
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Anthropologist
- Volume:
- 127
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0002-7294
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 43-57
- Size(s):
- p. 43-57
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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i ) as chiefdoms developed, leaders drew on preexisting social and political conditions; (ii ) while networks of chiefly interaction were defined by instability, wider networks of interaction were much more durable; and (iii ) quantitative network analyses and qualitative ethnohistoric accounts can articulate with one another to shed light on indigenous political organization. -
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