Archaeology of Frontiers & Boundaries

Until fairly recently, archaeological research has been directed primarily toward the centers of societies rather than their perimeters. Yet frontiers and borders, precisely because they are peripheral, promote interaction between people of different polities and cultures, with a wide range of potential outcomes. Much work has begun to redress this disparity of focus. Drawing on contemporary and ethnographic accounts, historical data and archaeological evidence, this book covers more than 30 years of research on boundaries, borders and frontiers, beginning with The Northern Mycenaean Border in Thessaly in 1983. The author discusses various theoretical and methodological issues concerning peripheries as they apply to the archaeological record. Political, economic, social and cultural processes in border and frontier zones are described in detail. Three case study societies are examined--China, Rome and Mycenaean Greece.

Until fairly recently, archaeological research has been directed primarily toward the centers of societies rather than their perimeters. Yet frontiers and borders, precisely because they are peripheral, promote interaction between people of different polities and cultures, with a wide range of potential outcomes. Much work has begun to redress this disparity of focus. Drawing on contemporary and ethnographic accounts, historical data and archaeological evidence, this book covers more than 30 years of research on boundaries, borders and frontiers, beginning with The Northern Mycenaean Border in Thessaly in 1983. The author discusses various theoretical and methodological issues concerning peripheries as they apply to the archaeological record. Political, economic, social and cultural processes in border and frontier zones are described in detail. Three case study societies are examined--China, Rome and Mycenaean Greece.

The concept of the border as a metaphor has been widely exploited across the Arts and Humanities and a body of Border Theory has been developed, critiqued and "rethought". It is remarkable that this body of theory has largely been ignored by archaeologists, who have instead preferred to examine social and cultural boundaries, frontiers, marginality and ethnicity. This book, which grew out of a session at TAG in 2008, explores some of the possibilities offered by the study of borders from an archaeological point of view and presents new perspectives on borders, both metaphorical and geographical, from locations as diverse as Somerset and China, from the Neolithic to the Cold War.

Despite a half century of attempts by social scientists to compare frontiers around the world, the study of these regions is still closely associated with the nineteenth-century American West and the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. As a result, the very concept of the frontier is bound up in Victorian notions of manifest destiny and rugged individualism. The frontier, it would seem, has been tamed. This book seeks to open a new debate about the processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts, untaming the frontier as an analytic concept, and releasing it in a range of unfamiliar settings. Drawing on examples from over four millennia, it shows that, throughout history, societies have been formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier pattern. The contributors—historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists—present numerous examples of the frontier as a shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably channeled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring processes of frontier history that enable world-historical comparison: the emergence of the frontier in relation to a core area; the mutually structuring interactions between frontier and core; and the development of social exchange, merger, or conflict between previously separate populations brought together on the frontier. Any frontier situation has many dimensions, and each of the chapters highlights one or more of these, from the physical and ideological aspects of Egypt’s Nubian frontier to the military and cultural components of Inka outposts in Bolivia to the shifting agrarian, religious, and political boundaries in Bengal. They explore cases in which the centripetal forces at work in frontier zones have resulted in cultural hybridization or “creolization,” and in some instances show how satellite settlements on the frontiers of core polities themselves develop into new core polities. Each of the chapters suggests that frontiers are shaped in critical ways by topography, climate, vegetation, and the availability of water and other strategic resources, and most also consider cases of population shifts within or through a frontier zone. As these studies reveal, transnationalism in today’s world can best be understood as an extension of frontier processes that have developed over thousands of years. This book’s interdisciplinary perspective challenges readers to look beyond their own fields of interest to reconsider the true nature and meaning of frontiers.