Theoretical and Methodological Comments on Social Complexity and State Formation in Biblical Archaeology

Archaeology has done nothing if not expose the amazing degree of cultural variation among both ancient and more recent pre-modern societies throughout the world, while archaeological theory has likewise broadened our ways of appreciation of this variability and the scope of interests and perspectives that the archaeological record invites. One such area worthy of attention is social complexity, the variations of which throughout world archaeology have received much attention, and it is well appreciated that older evolutionary theory cannot adequately make sense of such variation. Yet, biblical archaeology remains stuck with many outdated notions about social complexity and its archaeological manifestations. The assumption that complexity is necessarily attached to urbanism and monumentality is especially prevalent, and accordingly “state formation” of the biblical kingdoms is recognized only on the basis of architectural remains and simplistic evaluations of their substantiality. This paper seeks to untie this necessary association by demonstrating that complexity can occur in the absence of monumentality. Of particular importance to the early Iron Age, we demonstrate that societies that have a dominant or significant nomadic component can be complex in the absence of monumentality, while there are also cases in predominantly settled societies where monumentality is not demonstrably central to local ideologies of power and authority. The United Monarchy in ancient Israel, a mixed settled-nomadic society with both archaeological and textual sources, is presented as a case study for reorienting evaluations of complexity away from simple equations with monumentality and more towards contextually-imbedded, emic understandings of society and polity.