Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the

This collection presents a new multi-layered model for the evolution of ancient societies.

List of figures

x

List of tables

xiii

Introduction

1

(3)

The Evolution of a Factoid

4

(18)

An introduction to social evolutionary mythology

5

(1)

Types, rules, and factoids

6

(2)

Neo-evolutionism evolving

8

(7)

States and civilizations: beyond heuristics

15

(7)

Dimensions of Power in the Earliest States

22

(20)

The pursuit of the wily chiefdom

22

(9)

Neo-evolutionism and new social evolutionary theory: back to the future

31

(2)

The evolution of power and its distribution in the earliest states

33

(1)

Dimensions of power in social evolutionary theory

34

(4)

States as states of mind

38

(3)

What neo-evolutionism cannot explain

41

(1)

The Meaning of Cities in the Earliest States and Civilizations

42

(49)

City-states and chimeras

44

(1)

Cities and states

45

(8)

Mesopotamian city-states and Mesopotamian civilization

53

(6)

Cities and city-states in social evolutionary perspective

59

(32)

When Complexity Was Simplified

91

(22)

Simplifying the path to power in early Chinese states

94

(6)

Law and order in ancient Mesopotamia

100

(13)

The context of Mesopotamian law

102

(2)

The context and function of the code of Hammurabi

104

(5)

The complexities of legal simplification: decision-making in Mesopotamia

109

(4)

Identity and Agency in Early States: Case Studies

113

(18)

A peculiar institution in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia

116

(5)

Imagining sex in an early state

121

(7)

Conclusion: Encounters with women in early states

128

(3)

The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations

131

(30)

Theorizing collapse

132

(8)

Neo-evolutionism and collapse

134

(4)

Collapse as the drastic restructuring of social institutions

138

(2)

The collapse of ancient Mesopotamian states and civilization

140

(11)

The Old Akkadian state

142

(2)

The Third Dynasty of Ur

144

(3)

The Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian states

147

(4)

The end of the cycle?

151

(10)

Collapse as the mutation of social identity and suffocation of cultural memory

153

(6)

The collapse of Mesopotamian civilization and its regeneration

159

(2)

Social Evolutionary Trajectories

161

(19)

Evolutionary history of the Chaco ``rituality''

162

(9)

Non-normative thinking in social evolutionary theory

171

(2)

Southwest and Southeast

173

(4)

Towards a history of social evolutionary trajectories

177

(3)

New Rules of the Game

180

(16)

The game of archaeological neologisms

181

(2)

The engineering of archaeological theory: mining and bridging

182

(1)

How archaeologists lost their innocence

183

(2)

Levels of archaeological theory

185

(3)

Sources of analogy in archaeological theory

188

(4)

Analogy and the comparative method

192

(4)

Altered States: The Evolution of History

196

(37)

An essay on the evolution of Mesopotamian states and civilization

198

(30)

Initial conditions and emergent properties

200

(4)

Interaction and identity

204

(5)

The formation of Mesopotamian civilization and Mesopotamian city-states

209

(19)

Evolutionary histories of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations

228

(5)

Acknowledgments

233

(3)

References

236

(32)

Index

268

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Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials