The Past and Present of Delimitation

An archaeological perspective on boundaries encompasses two aspects of human behavior that persist today: the boundaries of style as a cultural phenomenon and the boundaries of nation-states as a political phenomenon. When examined closely, the stable-yet-fluid dynamic of both cultural and political boundaries indicates the long-term human propensity to create and break delineations.

Boundaries enable the distinction of individuals, whether artifacts or people, as belonging to a particular group. This simple act of classification becomes more than a cognitive processing mechanism when membership in a group is implicated in the interpretation of symbolic and political realms. Perceived ties of ethnicity, class, power, authority and legitimacy among members of a group all are signaled through the materialization of boundaries.

Boundaries of Style

In both the past and the present, we perceive that there are changes in the decoration and form of daily-use portable objects as well as in substantial features such as architecture. Much of the archaeological record of past cultures is in portable form, including ornaments, tools, pottery, and weapons. Modern cultures also show distinctions in both spatial and chronological patterns of style, in which new styles replace old ones at different rates.

The classification of material is an essential starting-point. Prior to identifying the reasons for stylistic transfer from one place or era to the next, we need to determine what constitutes a substantial difference among a collection of materials. Although it may sound like an antiquarian pursuit, the classification of objects is an essential component not only of traditional archaeological research but also of newer approaches such as evolutionary archaeology which evaluates the transmission of knowledge as represented in shared styles of object manufacture.

A coherence of style is evident in the archaeological record of the first sophisticated stone tools starting at least one and half million years ago. One particularly distinctive artifact is the hand-axe, a teardrop shaped stone object whose distribution extends from Africa to England, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. The remarkable similarity of these objects indicates that our ancestors’ capacity to adhere to a particular style was a component of our cognitive makeup even prior to the development of fully modern physical forms of Homo sapiens.

In subsequent time periods, the expansion of the durable material repertoire resulted in distinctive styles of pottery, ornaments and metalwork across large geographic expanses. By the time of the largest states and empires, material participation in a shared economic and political realm was evidenced by the widespread distribution of similar goods. In the Roman world, for example, the shiny red pottery known as terra sigillata was ubiquitous around the Mediterranean, and was widely copied by local manufacturers. In the Tiwanaku realm, the drinking cup known as the kero has been interpreted as the material signal of rural participation in state-sponsored feasting activities.

What were the human behaviors that resulted in the adoption of those styles from the array of possibilities? The form and decoration of daily-use goods are rarely dictated by elites; instead, factors such as emulation, utility, technological characteristics, and many other considerations underlie an individual’s selection of a particular form or decoration. Some constraints on style might be determined by manufacturers who offer only a limited range of options. But consumers also respond by selecting from among those options in a process that feeds back into producers’ subsequent rounds of decision-making. The result is an integrated top-down, bottom-up dynamic in which objects provide the materialized indicators of social and economic trends. In their spatial distribution can be seen a rich topography of human agency as materialized evidence for contact, adoption, and valuation.

Political Boundaries

We might assume that political boundaries are sharply-delineated in contrast to the temporally and spatially fluid boundaries of style. Accustomed as we are now to a world of national borders expressed as lines on a map, we are inclined to take at face value the statements of ancient political leaders that they controlled their territories through the establishment of firm boundaries.

Closer inspection of these ancient political boundaries indicates, however, that actual borders were often fluid and overlapping. Political leaders expended their energies on the most valuable locations of resources such as labor and raw materials and rarely made investments on the fringes of their territorial claims or in the vast “empty spaces” between network nodes. Point-specific locations such as cities, quarries, palaces and temples were places where political authority was most visible.

Boundary walls—even substantial, physical ones—appear to be effective but often are highly symbolic, given that one breach was sufficient for the movement of people. Archaeological evidence and historical texts show that the great landscape walls of the Sassanians, the Romans, and the Chinese were created along just a portion of their political realm.

At the edges of political territories, people experienced network rather than territorial strategies of interaction. Whether walled or not, settlements on the frontier often became important focal points that thrived because of their liminal status as trading posts and zones of cultural encounter. For people living in them, being at the edge of one or more territorial claims probably had little effect on their daily lives.

The fluidity of ancient political boundaries highlights the extent to which the firmly-delineated national boundaries of the modern world are a historical anomaly. The technologies of the state that we encounter today, such as barbed wire and security cameras, suggest that the state can establish and enforce delimitations that entitle those inside the boundary to particular privileges and responsibilities while denying that status to those outside. But most international borders remain unmarked on the physical landscape, and boundary-making is principally symbolized in specific nodes of transition, such as the border crossings on a transnational highway. Although the iconography of customs agents and color-coded maps indicates that boundaries have some fixed, materialized presence, they are much more fluid than we give them credit for.

The fluidity of ancient political boundaries highlights the extent to which the firmly-delineated national boundaries of the modern world are a historical anomaly.

Permeable Limits?

As we see today, political delimitations are surprisingly flexible: movement, culture, power, economics, style, and language all can transcend the imposition of a national boundary. The implied immutability of borders that we see on maps is instead revealed as a dynamic realm, subject to negotiation and change. Overlapping claims of territory are widespread, even among nations with otherwise friendly relationships (the US and Canada, for example, have an ongoing dispute over the maritime boundary of the Beaufort Sea). As such, the materiality of the state is only a suggestion of belonging.

Stylistic boundaries, however, are much more firm, maintained by the conscious process through which individuals deliberately select a particular style of object, cuisine, implement or ornament. Stylistic boundaries imply the existence of a collective entity in which individuals have more in common with each other than with those who are not members of that entity. There often is a finely-tuned, if not always clearly articulated, expectation about whether an individual belongs and can legitimately use the objects associated with a particular group.

The comparison of firm stylistic boundaries with fluid political boundaries may lead to the unexpected conclusion that stylistic delimitations are more fixed than political ones. The boundaries of style are generated and sustained by individuals who actively negotiate the interpretation of belonging through the active use and display of material culture. As a result, style as a marker of identity, culture, and ethnicity may result in tightly-bounded spatial delineations in which political boundaries are less-salient assumptions of identity.

Monica L Smith is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducts research on material culture and urbanism.