This work synthesizes and critically evaluates the results of field surveys conducted over the last 20 years in southern (lower) and northern (upper) Mesopotamia, with emphasis placed on the increasing contribution of off-site and intensive surveys to regional analysis. During the Ubaid period the density of settlement was probably higher in the rain-fed north than the irrigated south, and even during the phase of 3rd millennium B.C. urbanization, settlement densities in the north were probably equivalent to or even exceeded those in the south. Although trends in settlement were often synchronous between north and south, there was also a marked spatial variability in settlement, with declines in one area being compensated by rises elsewhere. Particularly clear was the existence of a major structural transformation from nucleated centers during the Bronze Age towards dispersed patterns of rural settlement and more extensive lower towns in the Iron Age.

Regional Approaches to Mesopotamian Archaeology: The Contribution of Archaeological Surveys

In Search of an Ideological Alternative to Marxism@@@Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture.

Traditional approaches to the study of political economy are flawed in two respects. First, traditional approaches have submerged political economy within a discussion of political development and the evolution of complex society. Second, they have emphasized single dimensions of the economy such as production or distribution of resources as being the basis for political power. Current research has demonstrated that political economies are a mix of many different resource mobilization strategies that crosscut the production, service, and distribution sectors of the society. Archaeologists must attempt to identify this mix of strategies as a first step in reconstructing the structure of prehistoric political economy. Elites strive to control and mobilize resources from as many different sources as possible and invoke a common set of principles in doing so. These principles or components of the political economy are the accumulation, context, matrix control, and ideology principles. They are identified here as common mechanisms of resource creation, manipulation, and expropriation that can be applied to societies at different times and at different levels of organization.

Political economy and archaeology: Perspectives on exchange and production

rchaeologists scramble up tall terraces, wade through cold water in irri-gation canals, hop over stone walls, and diligently search farmers’ fields for significant concentrations of potsherds that can be registered as a site. In their search for sites, however, most tend to ignore the landscape and what it can show us about agricultural intensification. Contemporary archaeology is firmly rooted in the site concept. Rural sites are said to date agriculture through proximity, and the density, duration, and distribution of settlements are considered indirect evidence of the degree of agricultural intensification. However, we pay only lip service to agricultural fields and boundaries, path-ways, roads, and shrines—all seem to be secondary to the goal of finding sites in the form of settlements and monuments. Agricultural features might be described and sketched on the back of site survey forms, but they are rarely discussed in final publications. Despite the term’s current popularity,

/pdf/intensification-political-economy-and-the-farming-community-4alcrhzplf.pdf

Intensification, Political Economy, and the Farming Community; In Defense Of A Bottom-Up Perspective Of The Past.

Quelques remarques a propos d'un livre recent concernant la region d'Uruk/Warka@@@The Uruk Countryside. The Natural Setting of Urban Societies

Karl Wittfogel's writings on the evolution of irrigation systems are examined in light of his distinction between hydraulic and hydroagricultural systems. Wittfogel recognized that different hydraulic conditions allowed for the development of different types of irrigation systems: hydraulic societies have tended to develop in massive riverine environments, while hydroagricultural societies have tended to develop along smaller water sources in regions where geographical features hydraulically compartmentalized the countryside. Robert Hunt's recent refutation of Wittfogel's model is examined in light of Wittfogel's own writings about the size and density of hydraulic and hydroagricultural societies. It is argued that Hunt's critique of Wittfogel's model fails because it ignores the specific variables which Wittfogel postulated as primarily influencing the administrative character of irrigation societies. ISSUES OF IRRIGATION and power have played an important role in the development of materialist cross-cultural theory building ever since Marx and Engels first recognized that the irrigation-based economies of Asia had evolved differently from those of the feudal and capitalist West (Krader 1975). In the late 1950s and 1960s, Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic" theory strongly influenced anthropological theories of state formation. Though Wittfogel's theory of the hydraulic state and "Oriental despotism" were partly derived from Marx and Engels's writings, Wittfogel's theories must be seen as having distinct epistemological and political roots. In the last few decades, Wittfogel's theories have been summarily dismissed by critics who claim that small-scale irrigation societies have evolved around the world without developing into the hydraulic states purportedly predicted by Wittfogel. I believe that Wittfogel's critics have unfairly ignored much of his thought by not addressing his distinction between hydraulic and hydroagricultural societies.1 This paper reexamines the theoretical basis of Wittfogel's model and tries to clarify exactly what Wittfogel claimed about the determinative role of irrigation in social formation. Robert Hunt's (1988) critique of Wittfogel's model is examined in light of Wittfogel's writings on hydraulic density and his distinction between hydraulic and hydroagricultural economies. Specifically, it is shown that Hunt's dismissal of Wittfogel's theory due to the localized management exhibited by many contemporary irrigation systems is premature.

David H. Price

Papers

Wittfogel's neglected hydraulic/ hydroagricultural distinction