Mid-Atrassic States: Difference between revisions

The first clearly differentiated archæological cultures in the Mid-Atrassic date to the Late Cronite Neolithic. During this time, people began to settle in more permanent villages, gradually abandoning the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle of their more antique ancestors in favour of {{wp|shifting cultivation}} and periodic relocation of settlements within a limited local ambit. This shift was facilitated by the development of horticulture, particularly the cultivation of native plants such as {{wp|squash}}, {{wp|sunflower}}, and various seed crops. Pottery also emerged during this time as a means of storing food and other materials. Hunting, fishing, and the collection of tree nuts, berries, and other woodland botanicals remained important to sustenance even after sedentisation. Mortuary goods, fashioned from æsthetically charismatic stones, indicate the existence of a funerary cult aspect in the religious life of the time. Cultures of this period are inferred to have been highly localised, small-scale networks, with very limited areal trade or political integration. Earlier Occidental scholars presumed the archæic Northeast Cronite religion to be substantially {{wp|shamanic}} in content, but there is little tangible evidence of this, and more recent scholars have moved away from the theory.  

The earliest trappings of civilisation among the native peoples of the Mid-Atrassic appeared around third millennium BC, made possible by surplus yields of {{wp|maize}} (attributable to the diffusion of co-planting techniques synergising the cultivation of maize, beans, and squash together) that encouraged greater sedentism and the formation of {{wp|chiefdom}}s. Hunting and woodland gathering correspondingly declined in relative importance to the diet as higher population densities depleted forest resources. Much later, around the mid-second millennium BC, these societies would begin to form {{wp|proto-state}}s, an institutionalised priesthood, and organised sports such as {{wp|chenco|čengo}}. The most salient archæological evidence speaking to the characteristics of temperate Northeast Cronan culture are ritual architecture in the form of {{wp|platform mound}}s, and unmistakable ritual artifacts in the form of ceramic {{wp|effigy|effigies}} and vessels, all linked to the routinisation of public, spectacular {{wp|human sacrifice}}.

During the Cronite Classical period, Temperate Northeast Crona became a peripheral part of a wider transcontinental cultural and economic complex centred on what is now the territory of Varshan. This was characterised by the areal diffusion of technologies and cultural practices spread (at least in part) by large-scale north- and eastward migration out from what is now Varshan, characterised by a more definite concept of {{wp|absolute monarchy|absolute kingship}}, monarchical {{wp|city state}}s as the standard form of {{wp|polity}}, and a {{wp|English_school_of_international_relations_theory#International_society|normative interstate political culture}} in which relations among polities were governed by ritual practices such as royal marriages and sacred oaths. The latter characteristic was made possible by the standardisation of a polytheistic pantheon<ref>Contemporary scholars regard the formation of a common, standard Pan-North-Cronan pantheon not as a result of imposition of one local pantheon onto foreign states or the spread of one local polytheist religion, but rather as a decentralised process of identifying and conflating {{wp|cognate}} deities from different pantheons together, perhaps augmented by the diffusion of the cults of individual local deities to other states as a secondary process.</ref> held in common (at least among élites) across this entire vast geographic expanse. Throughout the region in question, higher-order political entities above the level of the city-state continually appeared, fractured, and disappeared in the form of both confederations among city-states and "empires" formed by the subjection of multiple subject-states to the will of a ruling overlord's state. Numerous wars among these polities are documented, with the narratives around them suggesting that elements of both realist strategic-expansionist interest and {{wp|ritual warfare}} were usually involved.

 

The latter half of the Classical period saw the rise of [[Zurgite Varshan]] as a regional {{wp|hyperpower}} and eventual sole {{wp|superpower}}. By the 1100s AD, most of what is now the Southern Division of the Mid-Atrassic States had come under direct Varshani domination, and by the 1200s the southern parts of the Northern Division fell victim to [[The Hunt (Varshan)|their annual Hunts]]. The threat of Varshani aggression gave impetus to the consolidation of larger, more centralised states in the Northern Division, through a combination of voluntary federation and the annexation by stronger states of their weaker neighbours hit harder by the Hunts. Such states included Čukulub (first ancestral kingdom of the modern Čikibriki people), Činneqopaq (covering the modern Chapatec, Qoptanq, and Čapticolani homelabds) and Coapaqálpan (historical antecedent of Copacaban).