This article contributes to current debates on interaction, expansion, and resistance in Bronze Age Europe and the Mediterranean by refining world-systems approaches through the analysis of large, uneven archaeological datasets. Focusing on Early Bronze Age Iberia (ca. 2200–1550 BCE), it examines interactions between El Argar, one of the most dynamic economic and political formations in prehistoric Western Europe, and the non-state communities occupying its northern periphery. Drawing on more than a century of archaeological research across an area in excess of 210,000 km2, the study combines statistical and spatial analyses of the distribution of the available evidence with archaeological interpretation. Results identify macro-regional north–south economic gradients alongside localised patterns of resistance and negotiation, revealing a long-lasting interaction zone characterised by settlement atomization, enrockment, selective exchange of metals and ivory, and elevated interpersonal violence. Rather than passive margins, peripheral communities actively constructed this borderland through economic autonomy, strategic interaction, and violent resistance. These findings refine world-systems perspectives while preserving the specificity of local dynamics.
The first clear evidence of advanced dairy production in the Southern Levant emerges during the Late Chalcolithic period. This shift is marked by the widespread discovery of clay churns across diverse geographic regions, alongside herd management practices and organic residue analyses that point to a dairy-oriented economy. A comprehensive study of Late Chalcolithic churns suggests that, alongside increased reliance on herds for milk production, churning became significant. We argue that this technological innovation arose from the need to process larger quantities of milk for growing Late Chalcolithic communities. Transforming milk into dairy products like butter, yogurt, and cheese extended its shelf life, providing a stable protein source during seasons of scarcity. As a result, these products became central components of the daily Late Chalcolithic diet. Furthermore, these long-lasting dairy goods likely became valuable assets for trade and exchange, allowing communities to gain economic wealth and ultimately reshaping the socioeconomic landscape of the Southern Levant.
This article presents a synthesis of current research on several facets of the Aztec economy, embracing theories, methods, and data. It focuses on six dimensions of this complex and multifaceted economy. “Household economies” highlights the interdependent nature of households and the roles of multicrafting and intermittent crafting in household economies. “Commerce and interregional interaction” stresses the importance of marketplaces, marketing, and different levels of trade and trading centers. “The imperial economy” deals with processes of empire building, world systems theory, regional variations, and taxes/tribute. “Gifting and reciprocity” highlights this often-neglected aspect of the economy in moving goods and making political statements. “Economy and religion” merges these two realms of life, and “Object-based research” draws on concepts of commodity chains and techné to illuminate the travels of specific materials and goods. The primary threads running through these discussions are interconnectivity, variation and diversity, complexity, and dynamics and change.
Stone hillforts appear in the Armenian Highlands during the region’s Late Bronze Age (LBA) and Iron 1 periods (c. 1500–800 BC) and are central to discussions about the origins of complex societies in the region. Ephemeral LBA/Iron 1 settlement patterns suggest that, unlike in neighbouring Mesopotamia, sovereignty in the Highlands emerged not from settled agricultural societies but from hierarchically organized, seasonally mobile agropastoralists—societies that adopted the aesthetics of hilltop fortification, not urbanism, as the most conspicuous manifestation of power on the landscape. A recent surge of publications on late prehistoric hillforts in this region has paralleled similar growth across Europe, the Mediterranean, and South America. While recent fortress scholarship in the latter regions has been shaped by vibrant debates weighing traditional discourses of forts as engines of militarism against their material and semiotic functions as loci for social and political transformation, the discourse in the Armenian Highlands still, with exceptions, draws heavily on social models of military hierarchies. This article provides a historical overview of hillfort investigations in the Armenian Highlands and a review of perspectives from recent investigations with the aim of bringing this understudied region into global conversations about fortified landscapes as prominent elements of sociopolitical process.
This study reconstructs low-level food production practices in North China (12,000–7000 cal BP) by integrating bioarchaeological, settlement, and artifact assemblage data. We document a shift from mobile foraging to nucleated semi-sedentary/sedentary villages, accompanied by diversified resource use, early millet/rice cultivation, technological innovations, and emergent social integration strategies. Applying a multidimensional diagnostic framework, we identify divergent regional trajectories after 7000 cal BP. In southern North China, communities adopted intensive millet agriculture at different rates, whereas populations in the north either continued low-level food production or experienced only limited agricultural intensification. Our analysis demonstrates that low-level food production constituted a distinct socioeconomic system rather than a transitional stage. This system contained both facilitative mechanisms promoting agricultural intensification and constraining mechanisms that delayed or inhibited it. These mechanisms interacted with local environmental circumstances and social contexts to generate heterogeneous socioeconomic trajectories. This challenges unilinear modes of agricultural evolution and underscores the co-evolution of technological, social and environmental factors in early food-producing societies.
