ABSTRACT
The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July 12, 1893
Turner’s famous thesis – revolutionary in 1893 – is by now long out of fashionin telling American history, useful only as a talking point for revisions and reappraisals. The original thesis was about a pericentric process: the western frontier, through its cornucopia of resources and refuges, shaped the society of the metropole (the urban East). Frontier history has now become a discipline concerned with the diversity of places (emphasis on the plural) that accommodated a variety of societies, politics, and economies.2 At the same time, critiques from the fields of geography and comparative politics are reviving attention to spatial relations as an irreducible political element of the state.3 These critiques are both long-anticipated (especially following the influence of Robert McC. Adams)4 and newly received by the archaeological arm of Ancient Near Eastern studies.5
