Alternative Polities
Title
Alternative Polities
Author
McIntosh, Roderick J.
Research Area
Social Institutions
Topic
Government Systems
Abstract
The prehistoric landscape has exploded with examples, just recently recognized, of alternative polities—heterogeneous communities of interaction, of variable territorial and demographic extent, in which the constituent individuals participate in unifying networks of economic or political obligations or share commonalities of beliefs. Archaeologists are no longer constrained to look for the emergence of complex society in a framework of sequential, evolutionary stages the essential elements of which were defined ethnographically (neo‐evolutionism). We can now begin to appreciate the enormous variability in the courses taken, and in the circumstances leading to more and more people living together and interacting in ever more complex ways.