Gil Stein

Heterogeneity, power, and political economy: Some current research issues in the archaeology of Old World complex societies

Recent research on Old World chiefdoms and states has largely retreated from the general comparative explanatory paradigm of the 1970s and has focused instead on more historically oriented analyses of culture-specific developmental trajectories. Both theoretical and empirical work tend to emphasize a heterogeneous, conflict-based model of complex society and political economy. This analytical framework has been quite successful in documenting variation and historically determined patterning in the organization of urbanism, craft production, specialization, and exchange. I present an overview of this research and argue that we now need to reintegrate culturally specific analyses within a modified comparative/generalizing perspective on complexity.

Isotope evidence for agricultural extensification reveals how the world's first cities were fed

This study sheds light on the agricultural economy that underpinned the emergence of the first urban centres in northern Mesopotamia. Using δ13C and δ15N values of crop remains from the sites of Tell Sabi Abyad, Tell Zeidan, Hamoukar, Tell Brak and Tell Leilan (6500–2000 cal bc), we reveal that labour-intensive practices such as manuring/middening and water management formed an integral part of the agricultural strategy from the seventh millennium bc. Increased agricultural production to support growing urban populations was achieved by cultivation of larger areas of land, entailing lower manure/midden inputs per unit area—extensification. Our findings paint a nuanced picture of the role of agricultural production in new forms of political centralization. The shift towards lower-input farming most plausibly developed gradually at a household level, but the increased importance of land-based wealth constituted a key potential source of political power, providing the possibility for greater bureaucratic control and contributing to the wider societal changes that accompanied urbanization.

“Who Was King? Who Was Not King?”

The last two decades of archaeological and textual research have documented tremendous diversity in the ways that Greater Mesopotamian complex societies constituted themselves as polities (Fig. 1). This increasingly representative database, combined with the use of more processually oriented models of social action, have led to a gradual shift in research perspectives from a “top-down” emphasis on managerial structure toward a “bottom-up” perspective on the organization of Mesopotamian chiefdoms and states (see, e.g., Stein 1994a; Yoffee 1995). The traditional structural approach treated Mesopotamian complex societies as homogeneous, highly centralized entities whose urbanized governing institutions defined and controlled virtually every aspect of economic, political, and social life. This largely implicit view derived from the historic emphases of Near Eastern archaeology and philology. For over a century, archaeologists had concentrated on the excavation of monumental public buildings such as palaces and temples in major urban sites (see, e.g., Lloyd 1980). Similarly, Assyriologists tended to view the cuneiform archives of these centralized institutions as complete and representative records of the full range of activities, institutions, and interest groups in Mesopotamian society. This urban, elite-oriented focus was perfectly understandable, given the fact that Mesopotamia is the earliest known and best-documented ancient urban society.