Ethnicity and World-Systems Analysis 59of systemic interactions. Second, the concepts of contested peripheries (Allen 2005)
and negotiated peripheries (Kardulias 2007; Parkinson and Galaty 2007) are useful
in understanding how and why ancient Anatolia links regions. This underscores how
close examination of Anatolia offers a potential for testing hypotheses about con-
tested peripheries and negotiated peripherality, and thus to refine, emend, and further
develop WSA.
Greaves’s discussions of Milesian colonies on the Black Sea suggest how this might be
done (2010). He notes that the term “colony” carries much baggage and that much
trade is invisible in the archaeological record. He argues that the case for trade, rather
than lack of land (i.e., population pressure), is difficult to make since many trade goods
can only be inferred from the remains of the vessels presumably used to carry them. He
also notes that oracles helped individuals decide to leave and justified their doing so.
Implicit in this argument is an assumption that trade had brought knowledge of suitable
sites. Still, WSA must be used cautiously. Indeed, one can readily argue that cases such
as this could develop a richer understanding of the expansion of world-systems. The
linkage to individual or family decisions based on consultations with oracles points to
links between migration, politics, and trade that focus both on individual agency and
on ideology.
William Parkinson and Michael Galaty (2007) extend WSA in their analyses of
secondary state formation in the prehistoric Aegean (see also their introductory chapter
to Parkinson and Galaty 2010). Secondary states develop from non-state societies
through interaction with existing states. Pristine states, in contrast, develop in the
absence of contact with previously existing states. Pristine states have been rare, whereas
secondary states have been quite common. New states sometime succeed older core
states that engendered their formation. This is the “marcher state,” semiperipheral
development process (see Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997, Chapter 5). Parkinson and
Galaty also argue that secondary states were typically different from surrounding
pristine states:
From a world-systems perspective, the organizational changes that occurred during the
Neopalatial period accompany a shift in Crete’s position in the eastern Mediterranean inter-
action sphere. In the Protopalatial period, Crete operated on the periphery of the Near
Eastern and Egyptian cores, but in the Neopalatial period, the island filled a semiperipheral
position between the Near East and Egypt and the emergent centers on the Greek mainland.
During this transition, the Minoan states established themselves as local cores that extended
theirinfluencetothesouthernAegean....
Nick Kardulias’s concept of “negotiated peripherality” is particularly useful for under-
standing the changing nature of the relationship between Minoan and Mycenaean states
and their Near Eastern and Egyptian counterparts...the concept of “negotiated peripheral-
ity” captures the active roles played by people living outside the core (Parkinson and Galaty
2007: 121).This new semiperipherality was built on trade, reversing the usual account wherein states
developed and then pursued trade. They also find that: “Secondary states formed in two
basic manners: as remnants of larger entities that broke up after an initial fluorescence
or as competing polities that developed at the edge of more mature complex societies”
(124).