Asking if there were ancient globalizations is a question that might seem much easier to ask than to answer. The grand sweep of human history that awaits those who tear down the Great Wall separating modernity and antiquity is incredibly complex. One of the ways to deal with these intricacies would be to declare, like those who follow the globalization as long-term process approach, that all of these past interactions are the roots of modern globalization. Yet history has not unfolded along a well-trodden path of ever-increasing long-distance interaction from the first humans to the present (Wenke and Olszewski 2006). Instead, history unfolds in a more cyclical rhythm of expansions and contractions. Mesoamerican and Andean history, for example, is broken up into “horizons” of widespread cultural traits that are sandwiched between periods of regionalization (Rice 1993a), and Ancient Egypt's chronological sequence displays a similar pattern (Kemp 1989).

Archaeologist Joyce Marcus provides perhaps the best visual representation of these “peaks and valleys” of interregional interaction (1998) (Figure 2.1). Using case studies from both the Old and New Worlds, Marcus shows how various areas experienced similar “dynamic cycles of consolidation and collapse” over time (1998: 81). Although Marcus associates these cycles with the formation and dissolution of polities, other scholars have connected this pattern to the rise and fall of larger interaction networks (e.g., Frank and Gills 2000; Friedman 1992, 2005; Hall and Chase-Dunn 2006).