Since late prehistory, empires have developed and expanded to dominate extensive territories and large populations. The scale of even archaic empires is remarkable, as they sometimes incorporated millions of people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. To secure control and to finance their activities, these polities fashioned institutional means of rule that typically included administrations for decision-making and mobilization of resources, state religions to foster local consent, and militaries for expansion, protection, and suppression. Explaining the repeated expansions of empires challenges historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but there have been surprisingly few attempts to analyze such evolutionary developments with archaeological data, with some notable exceptions (e.g. R. McC. Adams 1965a, 1981; Sanders et al. 1979). As we hope to show, however, the ample diachronic data of archaeology provide rich opportunities for studying the development of early empires. Of equal significance is the alternative perspective that archaeology provides to the early documentary evidence from the early complex societies themselves.

Archaic empires, existing prior to mercantilism and the industrial revolution, were fashioned by conquest and incorporation of other societies, initially often competitors for power. As in the Inka case, empires arose out of the same conditions of “peerpolity” competition and alliance that characterized the evolution of states (cf. Price 1978b, 1982; Renfrew and Cherry 1986), ultimately succeeding by exerting effective control over diverse and less organized societies beyond the political core.