Joy McCorriston

The Structure and Dynamics of Dry-Farming States in Upper Mesopotamia [and Comments and Reply]

A model describing the layout of Early Bronze Age Mesopotamian states is synthesized using a range of off-site and on-site data from Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. These allow the description of the basic settlement patterns, land use, and exchange systems of an early state system. The hypothesis is tested that Bronze Age settlements in this zone of rain-fed farming tended not to exceed IOO hectares, an area which was capable of accommodating between io,ooo and 2o,ooo people. Detailed off-site surveys and landscape archaeology suggest that these settlements were provisioned by intensively farmed zones of cultivation that surrounded the central settlement and by tributary secondary or satellite communities. This main production zone was just capable of supporting the population of the prime site, but the constraint of labour and the frictional effect of distance meant that food produced farther away than some io-is km made only a minor contribution to the main settlement. As a result, settlements tended not to expand beyond a certain size. Even then, the maximizing effect of intensive crop production in such areas of highly variable rainfall and episodic major droughts made these communities very vulnerable to collapse.

Initial Social Complexity in Southwestern Asia: The Mesopotamian Advantage

The emergence of early Mesopotamian (Sumerian) civilization must be understood within the framework of the unique ecology and geography of the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the late 5th and 4th millennia B.C. The former gave Mesopotamian societies important advantages in agricultural productivity and subsistence resource resilience not possessed by contemporary polities on their periphery, while the latter gave them enduring transportational advantages. This material imbalance created opportunities and incentives that made it both possible and probable that early Mesopotamian elites would use trade as one of their earliest and most important tools to legitimize and expand their unequal access to resources and power. Given this, a still hypothetical but testable) model is presented that accounts for the precocious socioeconomic differentiation and urban growth of southern Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium as social multiplier effects inadvertently set in motion by evolving trade patterns. This trade was first largely internal, between individual southern polities exploiting rich but localized ecological niches within the Mesopotamian alluvium during the Late Ubaid and Early Uruk periods. By the Middle and Late Uruk periods, however, inherently asymmetrical external trade between growing southern cities and societies at their periphery in control of coveted resources gained more prominence. In due course, import-substitution processes further amplified the one-sided socio-evolutionary impact on southern societies of these shifting trade patterns. Unequal developmental rates resulting from the operation of these processes over time explain why the earliest complex societies of southwestern Asia appeared in southern Mesopotamia and not elsewhere.

Southern Arabia’s Early Pastoral Population History: Some Recent Evidence

Across the arid expanses of the Arabian peninsula and even at the margins of its limited upland farmlands in Northern Yemen and the Asir, pastoralism has proved an enduring and effective economic strategy through the later Holocene. Goats, camels, and cattle are the principal herd animals, with mixed strategies of goats and sheep, goats and camels, and to a lesser extent cattle and goats. Strategies have changed through time and across geographic and socio-political territories with the herding of particular animals such as cattle or camels conferring not only specific economic benefits and constraints but also playing significant roles in the establishing and differentiation of people’s social identities and statuses. While it is not entirely clear when a fully pastoral commitment, that is, one that emphasized production of secondary animal products, appeared in Arabia, it is evident that there long remained groups with partial economic dependence on herd animals and still exploiting the rich interior game (e.g., gazelle, ibex) and coastal-estuarine resources (principally fish and shellfish). To the important questions of when and from where domesticated animals entered the Arabian peninsula therefore must be added the question of what constitutes a transition to true pastoralism in the ancient Arabian record. With new evidence from Southern Arabia, it is now possible to address these issues there.

Acorn eating and agricultural origins: California ethnographies as analogies for the ancient Near East

Since cereals and legumes were successful domesticates, archaeologists and botanists have investigated early domestication with particular emphasis on these plants. What about other foods, which may have been staples in their own time, for which we have no simple continuity into a later subsistence in the classic region of Near Eastern domesticates? The mediterranean climate, and the lifeways, of California provide an analogy.

Autodetection of ancient Arabian tombs in high-resolution satellite imagery

High circular tombs (HCTs) in southern Arabia provide valuable information for anthropologists who seek fundamental understanding of the transition of ancient peoples from a nomadic pastoral lifestyle, to agro-pastoralism, and eventually to the formation of ancient states. In particular, knowing the geographical distribution of HCTs across the region informs theories on patterns of territoriality and environmental and social factors that are implicated in the emergence of ancient civilizations. The small size of the HCTs, vast search regions, and rugged terrain make mapping them in the field difficult and costly. In this article, a detection algorithm is described and quantitatively evaluated and establishes the feasibility of automatically detecting these tombs in satellite imagery. By narrowing the search to a smaller set of candidate locations, wide area discovery and mapping can be performed much more effectively.

Prehistoric small scale monument types in Hadramawt (southern Arabia): convergences in ethnography, linguistics and archaeology

The authors report new understanding of the prehistoric monuments of Hadramawt (Yemen) using archaeological fieldwork, linguistic terminology and ethnography. The stone tombs, platforms and alignments are shown to have experienced particularly interesting life histories. Passing travellers add stones and bury camels, shrines are reconditioned and dismantled to construct goat pens. It is clear that only this kind of multi-disciplinary expertise can hope to define the prehistoric sequence in an arid and rocky mountain landscape in which non-literate pastoral peoples have left few other traces. An online photo essay accompanies the article at http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/mccorriston/index.html

Pastoralism and Pilgrimage

Some 600 years ago, Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn wrote a theory of history in which he suggested a cyclical model of state formation and dissolution linked to ‘aṣabīyah, translated as “group feeling.” ‘Aṣabīyah is born out of shared desert hardship among the mobile bedouin, kinship relations, and catalyzed by charismatic leadership. Ibn Khaldūn’s theory emphasizes social relations over a material economic base rooted in environmental conditions and has been largely ignored by anthropology. This theory provides an appropriate model for the emergence of Arabian complex societies in the first millennium BC, an outcome little influenced by the social dynamics of state formation in surrounding regions like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Traditional materialist models of the development of highly complex societies rely on material sources of power and authority. These models anticipate an amplification of elites’ network alliances through wealth exchanges (supported by surplus production) or competitive appropriation and redistribution of surplus. In the southern Arabian highlands, archaeological data provide little support for these models but instead suggest that the emergence of Arabian kingdoms is best explained as the appropriation of local institutions of social constitution by charismatic leaders to federalize social identities while transforming kinship relations into patron-client classes.

Wood exploitation patterns and pastoralist–environment relationships: charcoal remains from Iron Age Ṡhakal, Dhufar, Sultanate of Oman

Pastoralists have played a key role in shaping the landscape of Dhufar, Oman. With woody taxa tightly restricted to ecological zones and evidence of continuity in the structure of these vegetative communities, this region is a good case study for examining the relationships between pastoralists and their environments over time. The ethnobotanical literature of modern Dhufar documents pastoralists’ preferences for woody taxa for particular tasks. What remains uncertain is the time depth of these patterns. The archaeological site of Ṡhakal provides a rich charcoal assemblage, a material culture that allows archaeologists to approach human–landscape relations, even as such assemblages are relatively rare from ancient pastoralist sites. We argue that there is continuity to wood resource use over the last two millennia and this continuity correlates with a self-sufficient herding economy. With statistical analyses of the taxa identified and their respective contexts in the Iron Age occupations at Ṡhakal, we detect continuity in wood resource use over the last two millennia. Our results suggest that the wood exploitation patterns at Ṡhakal reflect preferences for abundant wood types with distinct physical properties. Furthermore, these results are consistent with a long-term self-sufficient pastoral tradition sustainable over millennia in a region that has only recently experienced severe environmental degradation.