Problematizing ‘alliance’ in anthropological archaeology

Alliances are critical components of human sociality, often essential to social existence itself. It is no surprise therefore that alliance crops up everywhere in anthropological and archaeological discourse. Yet scholarship on alliance consists largely of case studies rather than analytical discussion of the phenomenon itself. While alliances can be difficult to identify with confidence in the archaeological record, they are too important in human affairs to ignore. Motivated by our belief that anthropological archaeology cannot fully address competition and conflict without a better understanding of alliances, we survey here various dimensions of alliance that we hope can be useful in advancing the field. We focus primarily on military and political aspects of alliances – i.e., alliances intended to increase non-lethal and lethal collective strength and power. Our investigation draws from the ethnographic and historical record of premodern societies to identify both the common characteristics of alliances and their dimensions of variability. We offer thoughts on how some of this variation might be explained, and we conclude with some hypotheses and suggestions for future research.