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Timothy Earle - How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory - 9780804728553 - V9780804728553
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How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory

€ 128.35
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Description for How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory Hardback. By studying chiefdoms Timothy Earle addresses fundamental questions concerning the nature of political power and the evolution of sociopolitical complexity. Num Pages: 268 pages, 22 half-tones 18 maps. BIC Classification: JHMC. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 223 x 148 x 23. .

By studying chiefdoms—kin-based societies in which a person’s place in a kinship system determines his or her social status and political position—this book addresses several fundamental questions concerning the nature of political power and the evolution of sociopolitical complexity. In a chiefdom, the highest-status male (first son by the first wife) holds both authority and special access to economic, military, and ideological power, and others derive privilege from their positions in the chiefly hierarchy.

A chiefdom is also a regional polity with institutional governance and some social stratification organizing a population of a few thousand to tens of thousands of ... Read more

Three cases on which the author has conducted extensive field research are used to develop the book’s arguments—Denmark during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages (2300-1300 b.c.), the high Andes of Peru from the early chiefdoms through the Inka conquest (a.d. 500-1534), and Hawaii from early in its settlement to its incorporation in the world economy (a.d. 800-1824). Rather than deal with each case separately, the author presents an integrated discussion around the different power sources. After summarizing the cultural history of the three societies over a thousand years, he considers the sources of chiefly power and how these sources were linked together. The ultimate aim of the book is to determine how chiefs came to power and the implications that contrasting paths to power had for the evolutionary trajectories of societies. It attributes particular importance to the way different power bases were bound together and grounded in the political economy.

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Product Details

Format
Hardback
Publication date
1997
Publisher
Stanford University Press United States
Number of pages
268
Condition
New
Number of Pages
268
Place of Publication
Palo Alto, United States
ISBN
9780804728553
SKU
V9780804728553
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Timothy Earle
Timothy Earle is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. He is the author (with Allen W. Johnson) of The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Stanford, 1987), and the editor of Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology.

Reviews for How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory
"This concise and elegantly written book examines how chiefs develop and maintain political power in prestate complex societies, or what anthropologists commonly refer to as chiefdoms. . . . [It] is path-breaking in its sophisticated dissection of the relationship between ideology and other sources of power that narrows the gap between cultural evolutionary, Marxist, symbolic, and human agency theories of ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory


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