| Abstract: |
Rome, Babylon, Mughal, Aztec, Inka
the names of these early empires evoke potent images of monumental ambition, grandeur, and decay. Empires are geographically and politically expansive polities, composed of a diversity of localized communities and ethnic groups, each contributing its unique history and social, economic, religious, and political traditions. This scale and variability pose considerable challenges to scholars who seek to study early empires. Attempts at comprehensive understandings benefit from and may be made more complex by the diversity of sources, including internal historic accounts and inscriptions, external accounts by conquerors or observers, and material remains, from monumental architecture to utilitarian artifacts. In this review, I focus primarily on recent studies of the material remains of empire, while also addressing works based on written records that have dominated our understandings of early empires (e.g. 60, 61, 86, 120, 125, 150, 152, 160, 184, 185, 221). I limit myself to what Schreiber (180) has called the more archaic forms of empires, and do not discuss imperialism in the emergence of the modern world system (204, 205, 212). I approach the archaeology of empire by drawing on sources from the New and the Old World spanning from the third millennium B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D. Even in cases where archaeological research is limited (193), the relevant literature is vast and this review is necessarily selective. I examine those early empires whose status as empires is not in dispute (e.g. 220)
thus, for the New World I focus primarily on the Aztec and Inka, with limited attention to earlier imperial polities (e.g. Chimu, Wari), while for the Old World, I draw on literature from the Middle East, South and Central Asia, Rome, and China. My emphasis is less on the historic sequences or artistic products of specific empires than on the development of comparative frameworks that allow for the recognition of similarities and differences in processes of imperial development.
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