To understand the classic archaeological problem of state formation as it was played out in Europe, it is necessary to place it within its wider context. While the terms “state” and “state formation” are still in use, archaeologists today are more likely to discuss states and their immediate predecessors in terms of increasing political complexity, since the line between a so-called chiefdom and a state can become blurred by the context of their development, and it is not always useful to try to pigeonhole such varied political forms.
WHAT IS A STATE?
It turns out to be quite difficult to define a state. In the mid-twentieth century, V. Gordon Childe composed his classic list of state “attributes,” which include cities, specialized labor, writing, monuments, and other “markers”; these have proved to be highly problematic, however, since some entities that are clearly states had no writing or cities, while Stone Age farmers built monuments of tremendous size; similarly, many nonstate societies have specialists in various tasks and crafts. However, despite the problems of Childe’s original list, it should be noted that many of the characteristics he identified are still recognized as important variables in the study of states. It is probably safe to say that states are complex political structures in which several administrative or bureaucratic layers are necessary for effective rule, and that they encompass numerous internal groups and stratified social classes over which leaders exercise integrative power in combination with institutionalized coercion.
In addition, while kinship between rulers and other elites is important in many states, the rulers of states rely for the most part on political ties with followers to hold the state together and to perpetuate their power, rather than relying mainly on the support of their own large kin-groups. States are also usually more or less integrated—that is, their “parts” work together relatively smoothly and are more or less controlled by whomever rules. These parts would include, among many other things, the political structure (the chain of command leading from ruler to various bureaucratic specialists), the political economy (taxes, tribute), jurisprudence (lawmaking and lawgiving), communications (roads, bridges, messengers), warfare (commanders, troops, supply lines), and the social and religious institutions partly or completely controlled by the state. When operations are not running smoothly, archaeologists can gain useful clues into the process of state formation and development itself, just as a modern economist might interpret a budget deficit as an indication of fiscal problems within a nation. Thus, archaeologists can trace the emergence of a state by monitoring the initial appearance of these institutions and by watching carefully to see who controls them—regional elites or a centralized figure. Often, there are periods during state formation when control of institutions by central authorities is incomplete. This phase may be followed by a consolidation of power or by the collapse of the state.
While today’s world is dominated by state political structures, they are in fact a very recent “inven-
Tion,” having emerged from pre-state complex societies in the Near East no earlier than 3600 b. c. They are also a rare occurrence: the archaeological social sequences that have not resulted in states far outnumber those that have. Many people believe that state societies are “stable”; in fact, they are one of the least stable forms of government and are highly susceptible to upheaval and collapse. There have been many theories on state formation, and many of the earlier concepts have been characterized as “prime mover” theories because they postulate a single trigger for the rise of all states, such as water control, warfare, trade, the need for record keeping, or demographic pressure. While such theories were popular for a time due to their plausibility and simplicity, archaeological field investigations have shown that one state rarely develops for the same reason as another; even within a single political entity, the causes of state development are complex and multivariate. Today, most archaeologists note the highly contingent nature of states, stressing local conditions and specific “historical” trajectories (even when the states are prehistoric), while at the same time using some generalizations and comparisons across cultures to evaluate how certain factors may influence developing political complexity in similar ways.
HOW ARCHAEOLOGISTS STUDY THE STATE
At the most general level, states can be categorized as either primary or secondary. The first developed where no state had previously existed, as an innovation in sociopolitical evolution; the second, through interaction and association with already-extant states. Those of Europe are secondary states. Why do extant states trigger new state development at their peripheries? One theory is that the presence of a powerful and organized neighbor creates a need in a less complex region to produce “equal” leaders and institutions to cope with and take advantage of nearby states. Another view is that local emerging elites, who already have power in their own societies, achieve greater control by limiting all access to the coveted goods and new ideologies brought by the neighboring state. In addition, if the nearby state presents a threat, leaders grow more efficient and organized to meet the danger. Yet another idea is that a system develops in which the original state stimulates development at its periphery to exploit its raw materials and resources, yet at the same time tries to limit that development to take advantage of its superior position. Once the process begins, however, it often moves outside the control of the first polity.
Since it is not always easy to identify the process of state formation, or even the existence of a state, on the basis of activities at a single site, the archaeological study of states often takes a regional approach. The reason is clear if one considers the questions important for studying state formation. For example, who controls the economy in a society? Is it individuals, a kin-group, or the political apparatus of a state? To find an answer, one must look at many sites with economic activity and determine whether they are under centralized or individual control. Similar patterns are to be sought for political activity, religious organization, and other institutions likely to be controlled by a ruler or ruling class. In addition, geographers have demonstrated that a bureaucratic hierarchy is often reflected in “size classes” of sites—large centers, small centers, large villages, small villages—even though the officials themselves may not live in these communities, since in some societies elites value spatial separation from commoners as well as economic and political separation. In historically observed chiefly societies, there are centers and satellites, but usually only three classes of sites: primary centers, smaller centers, and small villages or scattered farms. States, however, display at least four types of communities. Thus, if archaeologists observe a change in the organization of settlements over a landscape: for example from many villages, all roughly the same size, to a pattern with various size centers and outlying sites, and this is concomitant with apparent increases in stratification, centrally coordinated defense or economic activities, this is often inferred as marking a transition in political organization.
EUROPE’S EARLIEST STATELIKE SOCIETIES
Although Italy and Greece are part of the European sphere today, in ancient times they belonged to a world system centered around Turkey, the Levant, and Asia; hence their earliest phases do not relate strongly to the archaeologic record of the western, northern, and central European world-system. Nevertheless, the earliest state formation sequences in
Europe can be said to be linked to Italy and Greece. The development of Rome itself was secondary in nature, in response to interaction with the Greek and eastern Mediterranean worlds. Rome then developed into an empire—a state that subsumes other civilizations and cultures—and from that position triggered state formation in many other parts of Europe.
Important developments for early European states can be found in the Celtic Iron Age, which began in about 800 b. c. and constituted an ethnol-inguistic-political complex encompassing parts of France, Switzerland, southern Germany, the Czech Republic, and other regions. Already, in the Hall-statt period (800-480 b. c.), complex pre-state societies were coalescing as a result of the internal development of a Celtic political elite and interactions with Greek traders in the western Mediterranean who established Massalia (Marseille) at the mouth of the Rhone. During the La Tene period (500-50 B. C.), in the second century B. C., Rome began to expand beyond the Italian peninsula, and, in response, sites called oppida emerged north of the Alps throughout much of western and central Europe, spreading to eastern Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Belgium, and southwestern France. These were fortified central places with nucleated proto-urban populations, often housing a number of industries and the residences of rulers. Clues to their development lie in their defensive locations and walls, their close proximity to mineral-rich areas and good agricultural soils, and their position on trade routes.
The nature of these settlements has been debated: were they city-states, like the small polities of classic period Greece, or were they chiefly societies? Oppida such as the well-investigated Kelheim site, with walls that required more than a million person-hours to construct, had populations in the thousands, representing several social classes engaged in many specialized industries, and they appear to have been economic and administrative centers. Evidence at smaller sites indicates that elites may have lived outside the oppida as well as in them. This is not at all unusual: in fact, in some states, few elites live in towns. Many archaeologists now classify the oppida as archaic or emergent states that were developing independently before Rome’s intervention. Their full flowering was cut off in the mid-first century B. C. by the expansion of the Romans through conquest, and the eventual removal of local rulers and their replacement with Roman officials. Until the collapse of Rome’s empire, these regions were provinces within a larger state entity.
Similar developments occurred in Britain, as illustrated by Maiden Castle, a fortified hilltop that was home to as many as four thousand people. The Romans defeated its occupants and their leaders in A. D. 43, an event to which the huge stockpile of weapons found inside and the Roman projectiles found outside bear archaeological witness.
The Celtic culture was not the only one in Europe to have witnessed state formation in the Iron Age. Northern Europe, inhabited primarily by Germanic groups, was never conquered by Rome; and yet, beginning in the first century A. D., interaction with Roman traders and ambassadors seeking wealth and political advantage brought political change to what the Romans called Free Germania, which included much of present-day Germany, all of Denmark, and other Nordic regions. Although the empire planned to conquer this area, it was unable to do so. Thus, unlike the Celtic groups closer to Rome, the peoples of this region retained their independence and built a more politically complex society during the last centuries of the Roman Empire.
POST-ROMAN STATES IN EUROPE
The fall of Rome, like the collapse of any large, integrative political system, had a huge impact not only within its own borders but outside them as well. The post-Roman world consisted of former imperial areas and areas that had never been conquered, and the course of subsequent state formation was different in the two zones because of the preexisting conditions specific to each one. In northern Europe, post-Roman Scandinavians were left in disarray after the imperial collapse, but responded by forming their own, more centralized structures to provide the power and prestige that local leaders had previously acquired from their Roman connections. In the period from A. D. 500 to 1000, they slowly acquired increasingly statelike qualities. Between the eighth and tenth centuries, a settlement system, which included cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, emerged; in addition, a “state” style of runic monuments spread from the epicenter of the state to new regions under its control, and rulers began to mint coins, collect taxes, and mobilize large labor forces for public works projects. Although large laborintensive projects are possible in many types of societies, the building of the Danevirke, an earthwork many kilometers in length, by the Danes beginning in A. D. 737, and the founding of several marketplaces and towns that show signs of large defensive works, attest to the emergence of a stronger central authority.
Nearby Slavic peoples, such as the Wends living in the Baltic plain, also began to display more political complexity; administrative centers, markets, and other integrative features arose, often in connection with the coercive power of local rulers, who were linked by marriage to the earliest Danish and Swedish royal lines.
A different series of conditions was found in the Romanized regions after the fall of the empire. Many Germanic and some Slavic peoples flowed onto the Romano-Celtic continent at this time, and, from these old and new societies, new states emerged, often called the “successor states,” since they succeeded, or at least followed, the imperial apparatus. The “starting points” of these new polities varied a great deal: in some areas, barbarian Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Langobards, Bur-gunds, and others took up residence and rulership in what is now France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and other nations. Elsewhere, collapsed provinces reemerged as states. For example, the Merovingian and then Carolingian dynasties of the Franks, though Germanic in origin, came from the Romanized side of the Rhine, while the Visigoth kingdom was created when the Roman government ceded taxes and administration in one area to a Germanic warlord in A. D. 413. As imperial institutions fell apart, a system developed that fused Germanic, Slavic, Romano-Celtic, and Roman elements.
England, a category in itself, was both a former Roman province and a somewhat “de-Romanized” area, since it had been subject to many destabilizing Saxon attacks in the fourth century. It had also lost its Roman connection early. Constantine III, a Roman soldier who became the ruler of the British province, began a campaign in 407 to seize the imperial throne. To back his bid for imperial power, he took the last remaining Romano-British troops with him as he crossed the Channel in his march toward Rome. As a result, the hapless Britons were suddenly forced to organize their own government and military. Archaeological evidence from the terminal Roman sequence shows that the urban centers declined and the many rural villas faded away. Roman artifacts and coins are largely absent from strata more recent than about A. D. 400. By the time the rest of the empire began to collapse in the 450s, Britain had far fewer remnants of Roman structures, such as the imperial church organization, lan-downership systems, and legal practices. Thus, when their new states emerged during the postRoman period, they had a unique flavor.
The collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe was felt long after the fifth century, as various powers competed for supremacy or at least for a foothold. To take just one example, at least two states, Normandy and Flanders, formed within what would become the kingdom of France in the ninth and tenth centuries. This occurred well before the king of France in the Paris Basin had his own state, which eventually conquered the others. Additional states were formed around very small territories, counties, towns, or even the area immediately around the seats of local nobles. Many archaeologists have found it difficult to classify these areas as they existed in post-Roman times, since they did not display “typical” state features, such as urbanism, yet they were also not “chiefdoms” in the anthropological sense. During the mid - to late twentieth century, archaeologists working with paradigms according to which states were expected to conform to a narrow set of characteristics sometimes called them “post-state societies.” However, now that our concept of what a state is and how diversely it can form has been modified, such polities can often be classified as “differently organized” states. For example, structurally, Charlemagne’s eighth-century Frankish kingdom was essentially nonurban, and was similar to what is termed a “paramount chief-dom,” with the king keeping the allegiance of his vassals with opulent gifts and feasts, yet it was territorially larger than most modern states and had a number of the classic expression of variables usually associated with states. As the Holy Roman Empire expanded and gained new lands confiscated from the conquered, kings began to give land to their vassals instead. This increased the vassals’ power in relation to the king’s, thus destabilizing the empire and facilitating its further fragmentation.
State formation in Europe may seem at first to be a tangled web of societies that rise, spread, shrink, and fall in a nearly incomprehensible manner. Most people, comparing it to their own experience as citizens of a modern state, would find it highly confusing. In fact, however, this is a shortterm perspective. Controlled chaos is the nature of the state, and is more clearly visible to archaeologists, since they have a long-term perspective over many thousands of years with which to make their analysis. Many regions, when viewed from a longterm perspective, have periods of fragmentation into numerous, often warring groups, followed by consolidation into larger entities under unified rule. When Europe and its state formation sequences are viewed in this light, it is clear that, out of many Celtic proto-states, a period of unification emerged, during which they were provinces under Rome. Upon its collapse, these provinces fell back into various polities, which again underwent a fragmented warring era, and then slowly merged back into larger and larger aggregates under the Holy Roman Empire, only to fall back into a series of small states. In northern Europe, the chiefly societies of Scandinavia and northern Germany aggregated into Viking Age states, then were joined together under the Hansa and Kalmar unions, and later divided again. This cycle is seen across the globe, and is just as evident in the Valley of Mexico and the Andes as it is in Europe. Thus, while Europe’s various regions have their own unique historical trajectories, whose differences and contingencies are studied by archaeologists, Europe’s states can also be compared broadly not only to one another but to cultures as distant as the Aztec and Inca.
See also Maiden Castle (vol. 1, part 1); Oppida (vol. 2, part 6); Kelheim (vol. 2, part 6).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnold, Bettina, and D. Blair Gibson, eds. Celtic Chiefdom, Celtic State. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Ehrenreich, Robert M., Carole L. Crumley, and Janet E. Levy, eds. Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies. Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Association, 1995.
Hedeager, Lotte. Iron-Age Societies: From Tribe to State in Northern Europe 500 bc to ad 700. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Hodges, Richard. Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne. London: Duckworth, 2000.
Randsborg, Klaus. The First Millennium a. d. in Europe and the Mediterranean. Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Wells, Peter S. The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Tina L. Thurston
World History
