ABSTRACT
There were doubtless both states and nations in the pre-modern world. Abstract discussions of the state go back at least as far as Plato, and the Greek city-states were plainly the model for his arguments. Yet the city-states were primarily political entities, which claimed no pre-political origin in race or ethnicity (Taylor 1988: 202). Conversely, some medieval kingdoms could be claimed to have been ‘nations’ (Smith 1995: 22). However, the nation-state has been modernity’s characteristic form of political organisation, combining national identity and a bounded territory with the organisational characteristics of the state. A number of authors have pointed out the significant connection between archaeology and nationalism (e.g. Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996), but in this chapter my intention is to show that both nationalism and our archaeological conceptions of past social entities owe much to the formation of the nation-state.
