World systems in the ancient and pre-capitalist worlds

2012 (Gil J. Stein) “Food Preparation, Social Context, and Ethnicity in a Prehistoric Mesopotamian Colony” Pp 47-63 in: The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation, edited by Sarah R. Graff and Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, CO.

by Gil Stein

This chapter uses food preparation and consumption as a way to examine ethnicity and inter-cultural power relations in... more This chapter uses food preparation and consumption as a way to examine ethnicity and inter-cultural power relations in the worlds earliest known colonial network – that established by Mesopotamia in its surrounding regions during the Uruk period (ca. 3700-3100 BC). Food preparation and consumption often occur in different social contexts, roughly corresponding to the contrast between the domestic and more public or socially inclusive spheres. For this reason, these two activities can reflect different context-dependent assertions of social identity (gender, class, ethnicity) and different degrees of consciousness in practice (habitus vs. intentional symbolic statements). As recent analyses by New World historical archaeologists have shown, these contrasts can be especially marked in multi-ethnic culture contact situations, especially those involving cross-cultural marriage in colonial encounters.

Excavations at the site of Hacınebi along the Euphrates valley trade route in southeast Turkey. Excavations indicate that in the mid fourth millennium BC, the earliest state societies of the Uruk culture in southern Mesopotamia established a trading enclave in the midst of this local Anatolian settlement. The Uruk enclave at Hacnebi forms part of the broader phenomenon called the “Uruk expansion” – the world’s earliest known colonial network. The organization of economic, social, and political relations between Uruk settlements and local communities in the Uruk expansion remains a hotly debated topic. Evidence for long term peaceful co-existence of Mesopotamians and Anatolians at Hacınebi suggests that social and economic relations were based on strategies of alliance rather than colonialist domination. In this paper I compare several aspects of food preparation (food choice, butchery, cooking practices and cooking vessels) with the social context of food consumption. Artifacts from the more domestic social context of food preparation are strongly Anatolian in style, while those from more public contexts of consumption are predominantly of Uruk Mesopotamian styles. Significantly, local Anatolian cooking pot styles predominate even in archaeological contexts that are otherwise overwhelmingly Uruk Mesopotamian in character. The evidence is consistent with the interpretation of gendered ethnic differences between the social arenas of food preparation and consumption. I suggest that the Mesopotamian colonists at Hacınebi forged marriage alliances with local elites, forming multi-cultural households composed of Uruk males and Anatolian females.

“World Systems Theory and Alternative Modes of Interaction in the Archaeology of Culture Contact”.

by Gil Stein

1998  (Gil Stein) “World Systems Theory and Alternative Modes of Interaction in the Archaeology of Culture Contact”. In James Cusick (ed.) Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology. pp. 220-255. Carbondale,  Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Center for Archaeological Investigations.

The Limits of World Systems Theory for the Study of Prehistory.

by Randall McGuire

McGuire, Randall H.1996 The Limits of World Systems Theory for the Study of Prehistory. in Prehistoric World Systems in the Americas. ed. by P.N. Peregrine & G. Feinman, pp. 51-64,  Prehistory Press, London.

„Centre and Periphery in Icelandic Medieval Discourse“, in Á austrvega. Saga and East Scandinavia. Preprint papers of the 14th international Saga Conference. Uppsala 9th-15th August.

by Sverrir Jakobsson

2005 (Gil J. Stein) “Introduction. The Comparative Archaeology of Colonial Encounters.” Pp. 3-32 in G. Stein (ed.) The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters. Santa Fe, SAR Press.

by Gil Stein

East Asian International Society in its Historic & Sinocentric Context

by Nolan Bensen

This research overview attempts to summarize the English School of International Relations' ideas as they come to bear... more This research overview attempts to summarize the English School of International Relations' ideas as they come to bear on East Asia, and to situate that "world system's" end within its former existence and the integration with the European international system it underwent - some would say against its will.

It is a small paper, of course, compared to this vast body of work it is drawing upon, and so it really only synthesizes some of the choicer sources.

The People Without History

by Nolan Bensen

This one is hard to categorize.

The task was to synthesize James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast... more The task was to synthesize James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia with Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without a History in answer to the (trick) question, "How do you define non-Europeans?"

Networks of border zones – multiplex relations of power, religion and economy in South-eastern Europe, 1250-1453 CE (working paper)

by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

A shorter version of this paper has been presented in the “Data analysis”-session of the “39th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology“ (CAA 2011) in Beijing (China) on the 14th of April 2011, organized by Tom Brughmans from the Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton (UK), cf. http://archaeologicalnetworks.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/caa2011-networks-session-summary-and-discussion/. The slides for this presentation are available in the talks-section of my academia.edu-website.

The centuries after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204 were characterized by the political... more The centuries after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204 were characterized by the political fragmentation of the former imperial sphere of the Byzantine Empire; especially in the period between 1250 and 1453, attempts to establish hegemony by one of the local powers (Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia) were followed by phases of disintegration of these polities until the Ottoman State restored “imperial unity” in the region. While political border zones frequently changed, religious denominations (the orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, the autocephalous orthodox Churches of Bulgaria and Serbia, the Catholic Church, Islam) tried to preserve or expand their spheres of influence within the entire Balkans; furthermore, local and regional trading networks criss-crossed the region and integrated it in the late medieval “Worldsystem”, which was dominated in the Mediterranean by the cities of Venice and Genoa, which also possessed colonies in the Aegean.
The concepts of network analysis allow us to understand these relations between different communities and authorities in a novel way; Michael Szell, Renaud Lambiotte and Stefan Thurner from the Vienna Complex Systems Research Group argued in a recent paper:
“Human societies can be regarded as large numbers of locally interacting agents, connected by a broad range of social and economic relationships. (…) Each type of relation spans a social network of its own. A systemic understanding of a whole society can only be achieved by understanding these individual networks and how they influence and co-construct each other (…) A society is therefore characterized by the superposition of its constitutive socio-economic networks, all defined on the same set of nodes. This superposition is usually called multiplex, multi-relational or multivariate network.” (2)
We will demonstrate the application of this “multiplexity”-approach for the analysis of various political, religious and mercantile networks which connected individuals and communities from the local and regional level to the level of the competing political, religious and economical centres in the late medieval Balkans within an across border zones. (3) We will present how we obtain relational data from our sources, such as the Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains more than 700 documents for the years 1315 to 1402, and the integration of these data into networks of various scales; we will demonstrate how smaller networks can be connected to larger ones and how this influences the characteristics and topologies of networks. Finally, we will illustrate the applicability of this network analytical “toolkit” for other historical disciplines.
Our paper is strongly connected to the study of Mihailo St. Popović, who will present historical-geographical aspects of these phenomena for one specific region.

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