CHAPTER TWO
VERIFYING THE ROLE OF STORAGE: EXAMPLES FROM PREHISTORIC ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA1
Mitchell S Rothman and Enrica Fiandra
Introduction
As argued in Chapter 1, storage is about controlling goods that people produce for later use or redistribution. It is about integrating the labor, production, and subsistence of people, all within differing kinds of societal systems. These systems utilize storage as a primary mechanism for accomplishing different types of integration, from horizontal egalitarian to vertical egalitarian to ranked and ultimately to stratified and centralized. Evolution then is visible in the ways these systems change as the underlying organization changes, and in the Near East and elsewhere as in some places it moves toward centralized and formally administered systems.
Most ancient societies do not yield physical evidence of the associated control mechanisms. Greater Mesopotamia from the seventh to the second millennia BC is an exception. We contend and demonstrate that where we do have independent evidence of control systems—seals, sealings, and storage spaces (Frangipane 2007a; Rothman 1994a, 1994b; Fiandra 1981b, 1982; Ferioli and Fiandra 1983, 1993, 1994; Fiandra 1983a, 1983b, 1994)—we can see how societal structure and change correlate with storage practices.
The System of Seals and Storerooms
This sealing mechanism represents two parts of the control process. First, seals and their clay sealing locks are a means to limit (control) access to the sealed rooms, pots, baskets, sacks, and so on (Rothman 1994b). The sealing design represents individuals or offices. For seal users the impression is like a signature (Rothman 1994a). Those who view the design will know whether they have the right to access the sealed contents, so that second, when removed the clay sealings then can constitute a receipt for auditing (Figure 2.1).
The evolution of the seals from stamp to cylinder seal to tablets represents a need for additional information and to deal with people who do not have a face-to-face relationship, reflecting greater societal scale and organizational complexity (Rothman 1994a, 1994b; Nissen 1977; Winter 1987). The second part is the auditing function of seals and sealings (Frangipane 1994; Rothman 2007). From the stage when ancients used tokens to count kinds of goods (Schmandt-Besserat 1992) to the time of sealing and after that to tablet use, auditing was one of the modes of control. We know about the auditing function of sealings best from Arslantepe and historical periods (see below).
Clay sealings constitute homogenous groups related to the same organizational contexts, whether they are individuals or those involved in the redistribution of goods in storerooms or storehouses. When societies develop formal administrative systems, seals and sealings form the spine of economic management of those centralized systems. The functional necessity of recording, archiving, and accounting is the same; only the administrative instruments change (see knotted counting strings [quipu] preserved even to today in Peruvian villages; Chapter 8, this volume).
Especially important for the more complex societal organization is understanding the use and control of storehouses and what sorts of goods are stored in and redistributed from there. To confirm the classification of storehouses from periods before writing, it is useful to analyze literary texts of the early historic period. A few written documents related to the structure and functioning of storehouses in general and particularly those housing food during the second millennium BC mention the name of the storehouse from which the goods were extracted. Administrators wrote these texts inside the storehouse and preserved them in an office adjacent to the storehouse. This is why we must know the exact location of the archive.
Storehouses stock a variety of goods for redistribution. Sumerian texts refer to generic storehouses. In modern translations, if the disbursement of barley from the storehouse was mentioned, translators refer to the term storehouse as a granary. However, the same Sumerian word can be used for a place where the disbursal of cloth or liquids was conducted, even sometimes clearly the same building as the granary.
At the same time storehouse covers at least two categories of buildings. Some are smaller buildings suited to a rapid disbursal of goods (Figure 2.2). Storehouses are the final stage in dispersal while warehouses refer to the main, longer-term storage buildings, more concerned with inputs rather than dispersals.
The Sumerian term ga.nun seems to mean a complex storehouse. An important ga.nun was found in Lagash where, particularly during the Ur III dynasty (nineteenth century BC), it was divided into different parts, one of which may have housed cereals from which rations for workers and animals were extracted. Other parts distributed other goods (Crawford 2013).
The fact that the tablets have been found in different places in the city of Fara does not prove that they are part of private archives, as has been thought, but it attests the existence of different offices of the same administration, adjacent to different warehouses located in various sectors of the city for ease of management. It is therefore evident that administrative centralization is not equivalent to architectural centrality as seen in Festòs and Knossos (Fiandra 1997).
Another type of deposit is revealed by the Ur III texts with the term of i.dub, which refers to an accumulation of grain adjacent to a field. The verb dub means to concentrate; it may refer to a temporary deposit before the grain is transported to a real granary. It is interesting to note that in the third millennium BC, and afterward in the second millennium at Larsa, the term è.dub.ba in the administrative texts means the place where goods are kept (thus a warehouse); dub has a meaning equivalent to kishib that means seal, and thus the accepted translation should be “house under seal” The term dub also has the meaning to accumulate, and thus è.dub.ba may mean the “house” where goods were accumulated, or storehouse, as well as where the tablets were written. Normally, this is referred to as the school or house of scribes (George 2005). In the Old Babylonian Period (early second millennium BC), letters from Hammurabi to his land administrator mention an archive of land contracts in Maškan Šapir (Kraus 1968).
The finds in Chantier A of Mari clarify the situation (Charpin 1985). It is a sector with distribution storehouses, registration offices, and archives that still have the tablets related to the receipt of goods, and clay sealings with the same seal impression, which were recovered from the lock of the same door in the house of the fortune-teller Asqudum, probably a high palace official. Dominique Charpin (1985) states that the tablets and clay sealings are analogous to others in other sectors of the palace. So, there are different sectors with decentralized goods that are related through documents to centralized palace offices and archives.
As stated above, the range of stored and restricted access items varied. In general, clay sealings are not use to protect precious materials, but only where goods were kept for redistribution. Store or warehouses are not “sealed” vaults.
Prehistoric Greater Mesopotamia: Seals, Sealings, Storage, and Evolution
Given the parallel of storage and sealing, what does the Mesopotamian case tell us about storage, social practice, and societal evolution? In the remainder of this chapter, we concentrate on the prehistory of the Greater Mesopotamian north from the seventh to fourth millennium BC. In Chapter 4, Paulette expands on the use of storage in state making during the third millennium.
The environmental context of Mesopotamia is one of different ecological zones and polities of various sizes (Figure 2.3). The south is an alluvial plain formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. To its north and east is a progression from piedmont and steppe to hills and then high mountains. We are talking about the modern geographical units of southern and northern Iraq, north Syria, southeastern Turkey, and western Iran, into the Taurus and Zagros mountains. The interaction of groups within and between these different pockets of resources was one of the forces that created change (Algaze 1993, 2008; Rothman 2001b).
Figure 2.3 Mesopotamia sites in the LC2-5.
The earliest time we have seals and sealings is in the late Neolithic to Halaf Period starting in the seventh millennium BC. The cultures and societies of this period occupied a number of the different ecological subregions. What is common among them is a broad spectrum of grain agriculture, stockbreeding, and some hunting. They settled, mostly in small sites, and seem to have moved and resettled often, expanding into new areas. A number of sites may seem much larger—for example, Domuztepe—but they could easily represent not contemporaneous, but repeated re-settlings (Frangipane 2007b). Their food production methods were technically simple and did not require intensification, as later Early Bronze Age systems did (Wilkinson et al. 1994). They can be readily readapted to various environments in the rainfall agricultural zone. Craft production of very fine pottery and processing of obsidian complemented agriculture (Rothman and Blackman 2003; Rothman 2002).
We now realize how little we have previously understood about the Halaf economies. Some have suggested mechanisms by which the characteristic painted pottery was distributed among sites across a 600 km latitude, on occasion at some distance from the origin of its manufacture, but our understanding of ceramic and obsidian distributions must now also accommodate dispersals of organic commodities-plant foods, animals and animal products, oils, fibers, hides, fodder, even dyes and medicines. […] From this point of view, it is critical that we understand the range of variability in Halafian economic adaptation-in this case, how the Halaf was economically structured both in the dry-farming optimum at Tell Aqab and at its geographical periphery at Umm Qseir. (McCorriston 1992: 330)
Frangipane (2007b) sees the social structure at the core of Halafian society as horizontal egalitarian (see Chapter 1). Central storage at sites like Sabi Abyad (Akkermans and Verhoeven 1995) and Arpachiyah (Campbell 2000) reflects the equality sharing relationships at the heart of this type of organization. For a societal system dependent on rainfall agriculture, always uncertain, storing and distributing grain among many small communities became a key to survival and expansion. Cattle rearing was both a secondary and an alternative source of calories (Campbell 2000). The only goods found consistently in these burned storage buildings were large quantities of grain.
A number of factors confirm the relation of the economic system to social structures. Funerary practices show no sign of rank and vary widely, reflecting no ideology of inequality or authority. Perhaps the most important evidence of this societal organization is the sealings. At Sabi Abyad they were concentrated in the storerooms. All are from local clays, so these are not imports. Their numbers are unusually high; there are many seals, and their designs fall into a limited number of oft-repeated designs. This indicates that all the residents participated, and no one had greater access or control (Akkermans and Duistermaat 1997). The picture is of a set of possibly kinship-related groups sharing a central facility and withdrawing grain as needed. It is a society, as Flannery (1993: 110) writes, “in which risk is assumed at the level of the group” To summarize:
The Halaf society, taken as a whole, appears to have been a society of equals, resulting from the integration into the Syro-Iraqi Jezira region of different older traditions borne by various communities probably from different origins. […] Both the communities which occupied the plain and the hilly steppes in this wide region in the course of the seventh millennium and the later Halafian communities […] probably practiced a subsistence economy based on cooperation between different groups. (Frangipane 2007b: 163)
Mesopotamian society evolved beyond the horizontal egalitarian mode of organization by the middle of the fifth millennium BC. Some cultural indicators remain the same. For example, there is little variation in graves to mark ranking in ideological terms. However, the large-scale spread of ‘Ubaid culture compared with the preceding Halafians hints at one of the major changes. The onset of irrigation agriculture and the growth of specialist nomadic pastoralist populations changed the environmental conditions to which local populations adapted. The risks for individual families declined, but population and competition increased, creating new risks and selecting for different organizational structures. This competition is apparent in the violence evidenced at transitional ‘Ubaid/Uruk Tepe Gawra XII and XIAB, both of which ended in fire and with the skeletons of slaughtered individuals in the entry road (Rothman 2002). Surplus grain was available, and craft production and systems of exchange created demand and selected for a degree of labor specialization.
The results of these changes created vertical organizations. For example, at Tell Abada in the Diyala River Hamrin area there was one house that was five times the size of the smallest house (Stein 2010; Jasim 1985). That house had a higher concentration of goods that would seem to mark higher rank; for example, maceheads and palettes made of rare imported material. In general, domiciles, however, were of similar form, and they were of a larger size than the Halafian square or tholos forms, suggesting that extended kinship may have been a residential unit.
Tepe Gawra
This pattern is even clearer at Tepe Gawra in the piedmont of northeastern Iraq. Excavators cleared the full Gawra mound from the top to level VIII, and as the mound widened, they still exposed a full half of the mound by level XII (Rothman 2002). The pattern of equality sharing and vertical egalitarianism is clear in XII in the transitional ‘Ubaid-Uruk late fifth millennium BC period (LC1). As Figure 2.4 illustrates, the site consisted of a series of tripartite buildings. Each evidenced access to goods, including exotic goods (Rothman 2001a), and a full range of domestic and productive tools. The largest, the White Room building (Figure 2.5), is often cited as a public building. It is larger, has more storerooms, two with remains of door sealings, and a large percentage of in-context sealings. At the same time, it, too, has the same basic set of domestic goods as each of the other tripartite buildings, and excavators found both seals and sealings associated with these other buildings, as well. This leads to the proposition that it was the house still of an extended family, but possibly one whose members coordinated but did not regulate activities of others on the site (see Chapter 1). The White Room family shared goods with other members of the community. Another indicator of this equality is graves, which are very similar and show no evidence of differential status (Tobler 1950).
Figure 2.4 Storage units in Tepe Gawra level XII.
Figure 2.5 The White Room building of Tepe Gawra Level XII.
What is distinctive at Gawra XII, in addition to each of the storerooms from each of the houses, are two larger public storage facilities, a grain silo, and a series of small storage rooms by the entranceway to the mound, and a building that seems like a craft production center (see Figure 2.4). The proximity of the White Room building to the craft storeroom, sorting bins, and possible craft production building could indicate that its residents had some increased rank, but that is conjecture at this point. Interestingly, there are religious artifacts such as hut symbols (see Rothman 2002: 64–66) and images of shaman-like creatures on seals and sealings, but unlike the southern ‘Ubaid sites such as Eridu, no formal temple buildings existed in Gawra XII or the following Gawra level XIA/B.
What is different from Halafian sites is the scale and nature of interaction within and without the system. Neutron activation analysis (Rothman and Blackman 2003) of two categories of fine wares, sprig and impressed ware, indicates that they were being traded over a wide stretch of the Jazira from the modern border of Iraq and Turkey near Dohuk (the site of Shelgiyyah) to the site of Tell Brak in the Khabur basin to the west. Sealings of this period came from clay near Gawra but also from foreign sources, implying that trade was to some degree controlled (Rothman and Blackman 1990). This practice is evidenced by later clay sealings located in the Louvre Museum, related to the Ur Emush seal (Fiandra 1981a). Those with the seal impression of the transported container came from Kish, and those with the door closure came from Lagash, where the official had his storehouse. Other commodities found at Tepe Gawra like obsidian, gold, and lapis lazuli also had distant sources (Wright 1969). Obsidian from the 4c source around Lake Van appeared at Gawra, but also at Eridu in the farthest south. Relatively large-scale production of metals occurred at contemporaneous Değirmentepe, a site with tightly packed houses similar to Gawra XII (Gurdil 2010).
In a sense, this period marked a new scale of interaction in which people became part of networks of long-distance exchange of craft goods and exotic raw materials. Specialized production areas appear at sites like Gawra XII. Violent competition also emerged, as is evident by the burning of Gawra XII (Rothman 2002). The social organization appears to be an equality-sharing one, likely one with some nascent vertical egalitarian organization. At the same time, one could not call it administrative. As predicted by the model (see Chapter 1), it had both private and communal storage. In addition, the possibility emerges, only speculatively at this time, that Gawra became a center relying on grain coming in from outside the site, as the grain storage silo had many clay sealings, and the potential amount of grain stored appears larger than the needs of the site’s population (Rothman 2002). Surpluses from whatever source, whether used for redistribution to groups outside the site, for specialized activities like feasting, or as a hedge against a future shortfall, signaled a new kind of organization needed to integrate a larger, more heterogeneous interaction sphere.
Figure 2.6 Tepe Gawra Phase XI and workshops.
A few hundred years later in the XI Phase at approximately 3900 BC, Gawra level XA/XI evidences a new pattern (Figure 2.6). A relatively small number of houses with less living area than in XII appeared alongside three or four specialized buildings. They include a public administrative building; two specialized workshops, one for weaving (Figure 2.6) and the other for stone and woodworking, as well as, for the first time, a formal temple. The sealings and seals appear only in these specialized institutions and are made only of local clays. This pattern fits the model of Kowalewski et al. (1983). Their model proposes that in the period of early regulation systems are “closed,” that is, concentrated more on control of elements in the local system than relations with the outside world. A concentration on local products, especially food, would be evident. That the doorway to the temple faced out onto the surrounding plain (in succeeding levels it faced inward to the center of the mound) might signal a new kind of societal organization (Rothman 2002). It represents in theory an attempt to integrate the local population into Gawra as a small center; the only entrance to the Iranian highlands through the Jebel Maqlub is close to Gawra to the east, and thus places Gawra on the modern route for pastoral nomads and traders. Leadership does not appear to have been particularly centralized. Distinct sets of themes on the sealings associated with the temple versus the administrative building and workshops indicate some kind of division of control mechanisms (Rothman 1994a). Storage in this level is completely associated with individual buildings or institutions. There is no communal storage evident.
Three hundred years later at 3600 BC, Tepe Gawra level VIIIC-A represented another structural change, moving toward greater centralization and leadership within regulatory institutions (Figure 2.7). The beginning of a more formal international exchange system, called the “Uruk expansion” (Algaze 1993), dates to this time (3600 BC). Exporters from the resource rich highlands of the north and east shipped metals for tool making and display, chipping, precious and semiprecious stone, logs, and potentially other goods south to the emerging cities of southern Mesopotamia (Algaze 1993; Rothman 2001b). A huge increase in the finds of obsidian blades, mostly unused, indicates that the residents of Gawra at this time were participants in this trading system.
Figure 2.7 Tepe Gawra Level VIII, Phase VUIb and Villa temple.
Further, the three phases of the VIII mound, completely excavated, had very few houses (see Figure 2.7). A two-story administrative building with living quarters, a temple, a central storehouse, a comptrollers’ house, public building, corrals (VIIIA, the latest), and other specialty manufacturing areas dominated the site. There can be little doubt that the site had become a center, theoretically for a population in the piedmont between the Upper and Lower Zab Rivers, and possibly mobile, pastoral populations moving through the Jebel Maqlub. The misnamed Western Temple was a grain storage and redistribution center, a storehouse. Excavators found “decimeters of grain” (Gawra fieldnotes) with piles of utilitarian bowls like the beveled rim ration bowls of the south in its large southern room (Rothman 2002). The central storage building, a warren of small rooms, contained tools and manufactured items in doorless spaces that administrators reached with ladders set up in a narrow, easily secured alley outside the southern wall of the storeroom.
The seals and sealings confirm the central coordination role of the Gawra center’s administrators. Again, foreign clays appeared among the sealings. Excavators found one particular repeated design from the same seal (Figure 2.1), the bull, dog, and snake (Rothman 2002), which appeared in each institution, most in the area of what we interpret as the comptroller’s house. Excavators recovered pieces of the exact same sealing, with one piece in the comptroller’s area and the other in the temple, like a modern perforated receipt. All were preserved in good context, as the level VIII burned in a natural fire or was intentionally burned—it is not clear which—ending this phase of the site’s existence. Graves showed distinct stratification in form and contents, which corroborates the changes in structure from a more vertical egalitarian to a ranked society (Peasnall 2002).
The conditions to which the residents had to adapt were the problem of feeding a larger polity population, including specialists, integrating this partially settled and partially mobile population, in addition to coordinating manufacture and trade in the international trading system. Agency and the opportunity for self-promotion no doubt played some part in this increasing complexity and probably more heterogeneous population.
After Gawra VIII burned in 3600 BC, rapid social change occurred in Greater Mesopotamia. The trend of this evolutionary trajectory was the establishment of complex, heterogeneous, socially differentiated, administratively organized societies—that is, the state—in the period from 3500–3000 BC.
Arslantepe
This trend toward greater societal complexity in an environmental setting not that different from Gawra was Arslantepe, especially level VIA (Figure 2.8). The site is in a rich highland area, less circumscribed than the mountainous valleys to its east. Unlike Gawra, tucked up into the piedmont hills, Arslantepe’s chief locational asset was its position on trade routes from all directions: through the Taurus highland along the Murat River or across the northern edge of the Taurus massif moving west, down the Euphrates River moving south and north, as well as a limited set of mountain passes from the Anatolian central highlands heading east. The largest copper mine in Greater Mesopotamia, Ergani Maden, was not far away. Goods moving north to south into core Mesopotamia were likely to pass through Arslantepe.
Figure 2.8 Arslantepe temple-palace complex with storerooms.
Based on the evidence from Arslantepe, it is possible to determine the following:
(1) The functional characteristics and the type of room used for the administrative operations.
(2) The archival and accounting nature of the various groups of clay sealings kept as proof that the operations had been completed. The way used clay sealings were grouped in disposal seems to be planned from the very moment they are collected. This auditing operation took place in the storerooms.
(3) The number and positions of the officials involved, whether directly or indirectly, in the administrative operations of redistribution in which clay sealings were used.
The storehouses and deposits for this purpose have architectural characteristics that do not distinguish them from other spaces for other purposes. But they have a common characteristic; they are accompanied by spaces devoted to archival purposes where the materials that represent the documentation of the administrative control periodically are placed.
Before writing, these spaces act as archives where “documents” represented by the clay sealings with elements that represent the administration of goods during a particular period are preserved. Afterward, when writing is present, the archives preserve written texts related to the transactions and withdrawals of goods, and after this, even texts that record operations monthly or for a different period.
The conventional term of storehouse responds well to its function as it is the place where different kinds of dispersal were happening. Some is from large storage jars; the other room seems to have contained the items in question loosely.
The site was a primate center in its area with satellite sites at some distance away (DiNocera 2005). Therefore, the storage system was a major part of this trend toward centralization (Frangipane and Palmieri 1983; Frangipane 2001, 2007a, 2010). The storage rooms were off the main corridor of a long-lived temple-palace complex that served as the administrative center of the large town. Still, while larger than Tepe Gawra, in no way is Arslantepe at the same scale as sites like Uruk (see below). One room was locked from the outside to protect its contents, the other had large storage jars that were covered and sealed. As mentioned above, excavators recovered sets of sealings in an abandoned room. The shape of each clump was convex, as if an auditor had counted them, dropped them in baskets, and then threw them out in place. Excavators also found primitive counting tablets with impressed holes but no signs. We know little about private houses, productive activities, or mortuary practices, so the broader social structure is hard to assess, but the institutional storage system is typical of a more clearly stratified society. How much more administratively elaborated than was Gawra VIII is hard to say. Its probable role in intraregional exchange, the Uruk expansion, and integration of a far-flung population would suggest that the conditions selected for a more stratified, centralized system.
Still, the administrative system at the site was one of staple finance locally with an export system regionally. Culturally, the local leadership maintained its position in part by resisting the cultural influences of southern Uruk culture, while asserting local control, and integrating a dispersed population.
Uruk-Warka
One of the clearest cases for the development of the most complex of the social structures described here for the fourth millennium BC was the city-state of Uruk (Warka). We know it more from texts than from the actual archaeology, and we know a lot about the architecture of the central walled precincts of Eanna and the nearby Anu Ziggurat (Nissen 2001). We know little in detail about the artifactual remains in situ or about areas outside Eanna (Nissen 2001). Texts provide a detailed look inside the Uruk administrative organization. The Professions List makes the creation of a hierarchical system clear (Nissen 1986). A school text meant to copy words scribes would need, the Professions List from Uruk enumerated separate offices, “leaders” and subordinates, elements of a classic bureaucracy. Hundreds of the accounting tablets with the earliest writing found in Eanna were mostly lists of receipts into and disbursals from central storage. The Riemchengebäude had stores of imported goods (Forest 1999), although I suspect the grain and food stores discussed in the tablets must have been elsewhere on the mound. As at Gawra XI, administrative (the palace) and religious (the temples) organizations, the central institutions, were somewhat separated.
At Uruk and other southern city-states, each institution controlled its own fields, produced foodstuffs, and kept them in associated storage areas (Sterba 1976). Tribute or taxes came into the central stores, as well. The scale of the site is unlike any of the other sites discussed here; the population of Uruk was approximately twenty thousand, mostly not farmers. This scale and (from later texts) the heterogeneity of groups and institutions selected for a hierarchical administrative system that could integrate these groups, provide food for laborers and citizens in times of crop uncertainty (see Chapter 1), and control of international trade. Its bureaucratic players were clearly self-promoting, establishing a formal role through agency. Unlike Arslantepe, whose role in the Uruk expansion was most likely export, the focus at Uruk was more on imports. The uncertainty of agriculture, the lack of raw and finished materials locally, the ease of transport through a series of canals (Algaze 2008), the density and heterogeneity of the population, extent of economic demand, and probably competition with other local city-states selected for, or at least permitted the evolution of centralized, socially differentiated, regulatory systems.
As Paulette (Chapter 4, this volume) demonstrates, this evolution toward greater scale and more centralization, if also with greater internal competition, expanded over the next millennium and a half.
Conclusion
Prehistoric Mesopotamia, as outlined above, certainly illustrates an evolutionary trajectory from horizontal egalitarian societies to stratified states. The storage of grain especially, but other goods, as well, reflects this developmental trend. From the earliest example, some kind of sign-in procedure was utilized to confirm and record the identity of persons depositing and withdrawing grain from the communal storehouse (in a sense, this was more a warehouse, as it was the sole long-term storage area). Throughout this trajectory, seals and sealing use was a practice that reflected the increasing control, from a signature of a person equal in the community to an office, which had the authority to control what was brought in and to whom and for what purposes it was withdrawn. The structure of those who controlled the storage and warehouses through the use of seals and sealings apparently reflected the general political system of these earliest states overall, whether in the recruitment of labor for central, mass-productive workshops for cloth or for military campaigns.
The model summarized in Table 1.1 of Chapter 1 does work to describe the evolving social organization of Greater Mesopotamia from the seventh to the end of the fourth millennia BC. It promises to work for other regions and times ethnographically and archaeologically.
The question it raises is why do these changes happen? We have had a tendency to concentrate on dynamic models of the structure (Stein and Rothman 1994) or adaptation, rather than the interplay of social structures and the specific stressors or forces in the natural and human environment that cause change. In this case, agricultural uncertainty, the ability of agricultural regimes to intensify production for surpluses, changing scale measured in population and geographical size, and craft exchange over greater distances, all aspects discussed in the current literature were factors. We still need models of integration that will truly explain how these factors lead to specific results.
The Mesopotamian case also demonstrates the insufficiency of unilinear models of evolution and of step models. Four general kinds of social relations identified above include horizontal egalitarian, vertical egalitarian, coordinated and ranked, and regulated and stratified. In the Mesopotamian case a number of different societies existed within each of these categories. These categories should be successful for cross-cultural comparison, but greater specificity is necessary to understand change within any society’s evolutionary trajectory.
Notes
1. Thanks to Linda R. Manzanilla for her invitation to be a discussant at the SAA meetings in Saint Louis. Thanks also to Gil Stein for some very useful bibliography and to and Marcella Frangipane for permission to reproduce some of their plates.
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