the Mesopotamian periphery was part of a centrally controlled and organized process. Rather, as I have argued elsewhere in detail (Algaze 1993 [2005a], 115–17), the Middle and Late Uruk colonial process is best conceived as part of an organic process of action and counteraction, wherein individual Uruk city-states scrambled to found specific outposts tailored to local conditions in varying areas in order to secure access to the critical lines of communication through which coveted resources were obtainable and, equally important, to deny their local southern rivals such access. Second, there is also no need to presume that every Uruk outpost was set up by public sector institutions in distant early Sumerian cities, or that all Uruk trade was “official” exchange geared toward fulfilling the strategic needs of controlling institutions in those cities. While it is clear that massive coordinated building efforts such as evinced, for instance, by the Habuba/Qannas/Aruda complex cannot be anything other than the product of state-level organizations, it is entirely possible to interpret smaller outposts, and particularly those embedded in host communities, as the work of small groups of Uruk merchants in search of personal or familial profit, acting much like their better-documented Old Assyrian successors would a millennium and a half later, as Piotr Steinkeller (1993) has suggested.

Multiplier Effects

It is easy to visualize the role that the still partly hypothetical patterns of internal and external trade described earlier would have had in the emergence of Sumerian civilization if we focus our attention on the long-term multiplier effects of the associated import substitution processes. Some of those processes can readily be documented in the archaeological record of Ubaid and Uruk period Mesopotamian societies, and their likely impact can be gauged in reference to later historical documentation from Mesopotamia itself and to pertinent ethnographic models, when available. Below we examine some of the relevant data.

Flint

The southern Mesopotamian alluvium is entirely devoid of flint sources, and cutting tools and materials used for the manufacture of such tools constitute the earliest imports yet attested in the archaeological record of

alluvial societies (G. Wright 1969). Accordingly, it is not surprising that perhaps the earliest example of import substitution in the archaeological record of southern Mesopotamia is the partial replacement of imported flint and obsidian blades (fig. 12) for less efficient but much more economical terracotta clay sickles manufactured locally (fig. 13). This replacement process starts already in the Late Ubaid period and continues through the various phases of the Uruk period (Benco 1992).

In addition, by the end of the Uruk period some imported flint also began to be replaced with flint implements manufactured by southern craftsmen. Not surprisingly, this took place in some of the Uruk outposts along the Upper Euphrates, many of which were conveniently situated near flint sources. Indeed, specialized workshops producing Canaanean blades, presumably both for local use and for export to Uruk centers elsewhere, have been found at Habuba Kabira-süd (Strommenger 1980, 55–56, fig. 45), in Syria, and at the much smaller Uruk outpost at Hassek Höyük (Otte and Behm-Blancke 1992) along the Upper Euphrates in Turkey some 200 kilometers or so upstream of Habuba. In addition, some evidence for the manufacture of flint tools has been identified in the Uruk quarter at Hacınebi. Careful analysis by the archaeologist Chris Edens (1999, 32–33) of the evidence from that sector reveals that Uruk knappers at that site produced tools in types that were, at times, indistinguishable from those used by their indigenous neighbors and, at times, made in distinctively southern Mesopotamian technological styles.

Metals

A much more important and enduring example of the import substitution process in southern Mesopotamia is provided by metals, which are first attested in the south by the end of the Ubaid period (Moorey 1994, 221, 255–58). Initially, metal goods must have been brought into southern centers as fully finished products imported from metal-producing highland regions of Iran and Anatolia where metallurgical technologies were first developed (Kohl 1987a, 16; Stein 1990). Finished metal implements continued to be imported into southern cities well into the later phases of the Uruk period, as Frangipane (2001a, 346, n. 14) has recently suggested on the basis of compositional analyses of a lance or harpoon head found in the Riemchengebäude at Warka (Müller-Karpe 1991, 109, fig. 3).6 Nonetheless, the bulk of our evidence clearly indicates that, by the Middle and Late Uruk periods, southern societies were no longer mere

passive consumers of imported metal objects crafted in the highlands. Rather, by then they were well underway to creating their own valueadded metal industries that relied instead on imports of only lightly processed ores and of ingots of smelted copper. Concrete evidence of this shift is provided by the remains of copper ores and ingots found in southern Mesopotamian Uruk cities and Uruk colonial emplacements in the Mesopotamian periphery, as well as by evidence for the processing of various types of metal ores at these sites.

At Warka, for instance, piles of copper ore dated to either the end of the Middle or the beginning of the Late Uruk period at the site were recovered in the basal layers of the Anu Ziggurat/White Temple Area (Algaze 1993 [2005a], 74–77; Moorey 1994, 242–77), and what has been described as a metal foundry of Late Uruk date was also found (Nissen 2000).7 Recent excavations at intrusive Uruk outposts in the Upper Euphrates area have yielded both more extensive and clearer indications for metal processing. These activities are present even in the earliest phase of the Uruk intrusion into the area. At the already noted site of Hacınebi Tepe, for example, both polymetallic ores and crucibles were found in direct association with southern Mesopotamian materials (Özbal, Adriaens, and Earl 1999). Smelting crucibles are also reported in contemporary Middle Uruk levels at the small Uruk outpost of Tell Sheikh Hassan, further to the south on the Euphrates in Syria (Boese 1995, 175, pl. 13a).

Evidence for the processing of metals in Uruk outposts during the Late Uruk period is even stronger, possibly because pertinent exposures are much wider. From a storeroom at Jebel Aruda, for instance, comes a hoard of eight copper axes of varying size but roughly equal weight (Rouault and Massetti-Rouault 1993: fig. 115), which almost certainly served as ingots (Algaze 2001a, 208, n. 9).8 Several metallurgical installations are reported at the nearby site of Habuba Kabira-süd (Kohlmeyer 1997), where detailed analyses have shown that an elaborate cupellation process was used to separate, extract, and refine lead and silver from polymetallic ores imported into the settlement (Pernicka, Rehren, and Schmitts-Streker 1998). Not coincidentally, a variety of lead and silver artifacts are known from contemporary Uruk period levels at Warka (e.g., Pedde 2000, nos. 1327–28, 1338–39), although the sorts of chemical characterization analyses needed to show correlation, if one existed, between the processing installation at Habuba Kabira and the Warka objects have not yet been done.