At the edge of empire: conceptualizing Assyria's Anatolian Frontier ca. 700 BC

Abstract

Frontier studies have long been the focus of considerable debate in various fields and subdisciplines of the humanities and social sciences. As early as 1893, Fredrick Jackson Turner brought frontier studies to the forefront of research in American History by arguing that the political, economic and cultural underpinnings of American society were not the result of European influence, but were rather the product of the American frontier experience. Expansion into the vast empty wilderness of the American west insolated American pioneers from the European world while the rugged frontier lifestyle induced the uniquely American qualities of individualism and democracy. Although it has since been discredited on various grounds including, among other things, its ethnocentrism and linearity, Turner's thesis sparked a debate that even today continues to inform approaches to frontiers in many fields (Adelman and Aron, 1999; Cayton and Teute, 1998; Faragher, 1994; Jacobs, 1994; White, 1991). Frontiers are also, of course, fundamental to geographers who took up their own discussion of the topic early in the twentieth century (Curzon, 1907; Fawcett, 191 8; Ratzel, 1897). In fact, their definition of concepts such as maritime and aerial borders as well as their discussion of political and ethnic boundaries was instrumental in shaping the physicality of modern nation states (Baty, 1928; Boggs, 1930, 1937, 1940; Crocker, 19 19; Fawcett, 191 8; Fischer, 1949; Holdich, 1916). The fields of Classics and Ancient History also have a long history of frontier studies, with some of the major works in especially Roman studies focused on the frontiers of the empire (Dyson, 1985; Elton, 1996; Isaac, 1990; Luttwak, 1976; Whittaker, 1994 for example). Frontier studies reached the fields of social science and anthropology first through the study of the process of acculturation (Broom et al., 1954; Spencer, 1961; Redfield et al., 1936) and more recently through the development and application of Wallerstein's World Systems Theory (Wallerstein, 1974, 1980). In recent years world systems theory has helped to direct frontier studies in these disciplines by giving researchers a framework within which to turn their focus from core polities to peripheral regions (Chase-Dunn, 1988; ChaseDunn and Hall, 1991, 1992). This debate soon spread to archaeology as scholars attempted to adapt the basic tenets of this model to the ancient world (Algaze, 1989b, 1993; Blanton and Feinman, 1984; Champion, 1989; Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1991; Kohl, 1987; Rowlands et al., 1987; Stein, 1999). Despite nearly a century of research in these and other fields, however, there is still very little consensus about classifications and comparative frameworks within which to consider an interdisciplinary study of frontiers. Prudence Rice recently concluded that her review of various