STATE FORMATION and MEDIEVAL GOVERNMENT 1.1. From

CHAPTER ONE STATE FORMATION AND MEDIEVAL GOVERNMENT 1.1. From Chiefdom to State Since 1950 the anthropological study of forms of human social and political organisation has progressed by leaps and bounds. Having begun with attempts to define the formal characteristics of different organisational structures, the emphasis has now shifted to examina- tion of the functioning of political institutions and the methods by which elites maintain control over different social and economic activities. Correspondingly, aided by advances in scientific dating methods, archaeologists have abandoned the old preoccupation with typology and dating and seek to interpret physical remains within their wider social context. In many countries archaeology is now considered a branch of anthropology. The modern archaeologist, or at least those who do not deny that the systematic survey and obser- vation of changing landscape patterns can give us an insight, into not only how human societies were organised but how people thought, now enters the fields of cultural geography and environmental and social studies.1 The interpretation of physical phenomena is inevitably subjective, and as such must be open to re-interpretation, but, to return to the debate that was begun by the so-called ‘processual’ archaeologists in the 1960s, there seems little point in spending time, effort and money solely to establish a chronology of artefacts and structures. The debates that surround ‘processual’ and ‘post-processual’ archaeology, essentially about the extent to which generalisations can be made and the level of physical evidence required to interpret landscapes, are (fortunately) beyond this volume.2 A related debate 1 A ‘landscape’ is taken to incorporate both natural and human-made features. 2 See Renfrew and Bahn 1996 pp. 36–44, for a summary of these concepts. Unfortunately much of the terminology used by those who espoused the ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s was pseudo-scientific, if not outright jargon, and archaeology has not entirely escaped from this since. Since pioneers of processual archaeology such as Lewis Binford placed heavy emphasis on theorising and testing of hypotheses in true scientific fashion, they recommended the exclusion of history, a 2 chapter one concerns the extent to which theorizing about a particular culture of region can only be grounded in a detailed study of all landscapes and remains within it. For instance, while some accept the use of ethnohistory to illuminate the culture of apparently similar societies in an earlier time or a dissimilar environment, others do not. Such difficulties touch upon the theme and period studied here, as written evidence gives at best an incomplete picture and state formation cannot be studied in isolation from social and economic history. The majority of pre-state societies have left few written records, although aspects of many have been recorded by writers from more advanced societies that have existed concurrently. Unfortunately there were not many of these writers, many of their works have not sur- vived, and references to peoples beyond the borders of their own polity were usually made only when the people in question inter- fered in it.3 Written sources for early medieval Europe may be more plentiful than they are for the classical world, but they are still rare and were usually written by a limited number of people from a priv- ileged background, and often from a narrow perspective. In many ways the sources for Scandinavia before 1100, during what is often termed a proto-historic period, are analogous to those for the peoples outside the Greek and Roman orbit in the classical period, in that they see Scandinavia as a little-known and often uncivilized region. By the Viking Period, c. 800–1050 ad, we may read un- Christianised for uncivilized. In the twelfth century Sweden had only recently been Christianised, at least in name, and was barely emerg- ing from prehistory; only during that century would a literate clergy be introduced permanently into the region. The written sources for Sweden from 1100 to 1250 are almost as poor as those for Denmark and Norway in the Viking Period. The historian is therefore con- fronted with a similar problem to that faced by the archaeologist culturally constructed concept that distracts from interpretation of the archaeologi- cal record. In the 1980s certain archaeologists, such as Ian Hodder, reacted against aspects of processualism, and a heated debate began. In the 1990s Hodder sug- gested the term ‘interpretive archaeologies’ for their ideas, in place of ‘post-processual’, since the ideas of the two camps were often quite closely related. 3 Throughout this work the term ‘polity’ is used to designate the highest order autonomous socio-political unit in the region in question, as defined by Renfrew. ‘Polity’ does not imply any specific degree of complexity or scale of organisation, and could therefore be a chiefdom or an empire, a village or a huge area encom- passing half of Europe or Asia Minor. See Renfrew 1986 pp. 2–3. .

Load more