This robust, timely and impressive volume begins with an observation that the considerable scholarly investigation of empires both ancient and more recent is unsurprising; legacies of historical imperialism have shaped the early twenty-first century world. Moreover, we are reminded, as a discipline that adopts multi-scalar perspectives and offers access to the people and developments not recorded in written histories, archaeology is uniquely positioned to probe questions about how empires come into being, how they behave, how they transform the landscapes and communities they seek to subjugate, and how, in turn, those places and people shape imperial states. Yet, throughout the volume, the editors and contributing authors also make a persuasive case that despite so much scholarly attention, existing comparative models in archaeology fall short, flattening the messiness, the heterogeneity and the longevity of empires.
Ambitious and, to this reader, successful in its goals, Archaeologies of empire brings together scholars of imperial projects in diverse regions and periods to offer new theoretical directions. The chapters examine how people with very different degrees of power negotiated their relationships with imperial powers; they explore the diversity of imperial encounters with landscapes and local societies not only between but also within empires. Deploying the concept of imperial repertoires—“the dynamic packages of technologies, institutions, cultural practices, and religious and ideological ideas harnessed by empires” (p. 4)—the contributing authors not only interrogate how empires work, but also seek to identify their ancestries, finding the ‘ghosts’ of earlier imperial states appearing centuries—even millennia—later, in the strategies of subsequent empires.
The volume begins with Anna Boozer and Patrick Ryan William's moving reflections on the foundational contributions to the archaeology of empires of the late Bradley J. Parker, one of the three editors and to whose memory the volume is dedicated. The following introduction provides a brief but effective overview of the models (territorial/hegemonic; core/periphery; network) frequently deployed in archaeological investigations of empire and explains the organisation of the seven case-study chapters into three themes: ‘migrant settlers and local communities’; ‘imperial impacts: provinces and peripheries’; and ‘trajectories of imperial development’. In its last two chapters, the volume returns to the explicitly comparative approach and provides substantial opportunities for future avenues of research.
The volume's temporal and geographical scope is considerable, with case studies on Egyptian Middle and New Kingdom Empires in Nubia (Stuart Tyson Smith); the Han Empire (Alice Yao); provinces of the Inka Empire (Sonia Alconini); the Roman Imperial presences in Egypt (Anna L. Boozer); the Early Assyrian Empire (Bleda S. Düring); household and temporal perspectives on Aztec Mexico (Lisa Overholtzer); and the Wari and Tiwanaku of the Andean Middle Horizon (Patrick Ryan Williams, Donna Nash and Sofia Chacaltana). Chapters are substantial in length; all are data driven, although there is a striking diversity in analytical scale (regional, local, household, individual tombs), methodologies (pedestrian survey, architectural and artistic studies, compositional analyses), and evidentiary bodies (material and, to a lesser degree, textual). Despite this, no chapter feels out of place, and the editors and authors deserve considerable credit for crafting a volume that is coherent and cogent because of and not despite its breadth.
Most notably, although bookended by the explicitly comparative chapters, all the individual case studies are theoretically rich and provocative. Several authors propose approaches useful beyond the example at hand. Noting the “tyranny of pottery style as a determinant of imperial influence”, Williams, Nash and Chacaltana (p. 201) outline and exemplify a diverse range of material markers for reconstructing the relative role of military, ideological and economic power in imperial projects. Yao interrogates concepts of boundary and, in so doing, offers a new perspective on the Great Wall, casting civilians, migrants and settlers as imperial agents, and also makes connections between the concerns of ancient empires and the politics of nation-states today. Situated early in the volume, Yao's chapter exemplifies the central argument of the volume's final chapter, in which Boozer and Düring urge scholars of ancient and recent empires to unify their intellectual endeavours.
The idea of entanglement recurs in the volume. Boozer highlights tomb paintings to illustrate how wealthy locals in Rome's Egyptian provinces embraced cosmopolitan identities, equally comfortable in both the Egyptian and Roman worlds. Smith reconstructs processes of “cultural interweaving [that were] highly diverse, allowing individuals to generate new, polyvalent identities within pluralistic societies” (p. 53). Agency is ever present in the case studies, overt in some chapters and lying just under the surface in others. Asking who gained from the Assyrian annexation of Upper Mesopotamia, Düring highlights incentives for various groups of Assyrian and non-Assyrian agents, among them poorer farmer-colonists whose benefits and participation in imperial dynamics are overlooked in top-down perspectives. Alconini considers the motivating benefits of empire for local elites; her comparison of imperial repertoires in two south-eastern Inka frontier regions also highlights important differences in the role of political economy and the place of Indigenous elites, illustrating a central theme of the volume. A number of chapters consider time, including in Williams, Nash and Chacaltana's discussion of how the Inka built on earlier Wari repertories, but Overholtzer's use of household data and Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates to reconstruct the rhythms of Aztec imperial beginnings most explicitly confronts questions of time, and aptly demonstrates the possibilities of archaeology's diachronic contributions.
Each of these chapters makes substantial contributions to the volume's goals—in data, method and theory. Parker's chapter, the penultimate in the book, is, however, perhaps the powerhouse of Archaeologies of empire. In it, he does what the volume really sets out to do: drawing on the seven case studies to suggest new avenues. Stating a goal of bridging theory and data to remodel empires in ways that are archaeologically manifest, Parker draws upon Michael Mann's (Reference Mann1986) seminal work to lay out political, ideological, social and economic pathways to power, conceiving pathways as “the conduits through which imperial power is disseminated and Indigenous reaction is reverberated” (p. 238). Notably, rather than discarding the established analytical models of empire dissected earlier in the book, he builds upon territorial/hegemonic, core/periphery and network approaches. Parker's model offers a new opportunity for the study of empires: one which incorporates imperial repertoires, makes space for agency's multifaceted loci, and attributes critical roles to local circumstance and historical process. This volume will make significant and, I anticipate, lasting contributions to the study of empires.
