the corpus of existing, newly published, and reinterpreted materials from the Uruk core with the growing body of recent and ongoing work in northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey relevant to what has often been termed the Uruk expansion (summarized in Algaze 2005a, chap. 8). Stemming from opposite extremes of the Uruk world system, each of these bodies of materials provides a different but complementary perspective on the “great leap forward” of fourth-millennium early Sumerian societies.

Lastly, this is a time for reflection as a prelude to further action. Sooner or later archaeological research will again be possible in Iraq and southwestern Iran, and, when that happens, a new generation of researchers will need a clear understanding of the gaps remaining to be filled if our comprehension of the emergence of early Sumerian civilization is to improve substantially over present levels. The need for carefully targeted research will be particularly acute in the case of Iraq, because existing evidentiary gaps there are being compounded on a daily basis, and made less amenable to remediation, by the systematic looting of the country’s rich archaeological heritage, which continues appallingly unabated at present.

In what follows, by way of getting a discussion started, I list some of those evidentiary shortcomings and briefly provide some preliminary, and necessarily naïve, suggestions for possible ways to address some of them.

Agency

The first research agenda for the future is without a doubt one of the most difficult to successfully bring to fruition, but is also one that can be started immediately with data at hand. In a cogent criticism of one of my earlier papers, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla (2001), a sociologist, argued that the sorts of environmental and economic variables that are the focus of this book fail to address the proximate causes of the formation of early cities and states, which he sees as entirely political and historically contingent. Taken to its ultimate logical conclusion, Cioffi-Revilla’s argument means that to truly understand how cities and states form we must also be able to reconstruct in detail the various strategies used by early elites to convince dependent commoners in their grasp that their interests were in fact coterminous—what he terms the “collective action problem.”

Cioffi-Revilla is certainly correct, and his comment raises a serious issue that was noted earlier and that must now be addressed: how are we to achieve a thorough understanding of historically contingent strategies of social manipulation in the case of early pristine civilizations—societies that commonly are documented only through chronologically imprecise archaeological work, and that typically lack detailed historical and literary documentation? Or, to rephrase the question in terms specific to the early Mesopotamian case: how did the first rulers of newly formed Uruk city-states manage to persuade and/or coerce people in surrounding villages, marshes, and pasture lands to relinquish autonomy, resources, and, most importantly, labor to urban institutions they had never known before; and how did the new urban elites get the laborers to work in ways that must have been quite different—in terms of organization—from those that they were accustomed to in traditional tribal societies?

To be frank, given the nature of the evidence that exists for fourthmillennium Mesopotamia (chaps. 2 and 7, above), I doubt that we will ever be able to answer such questions with any degree of precision. However, I suspect that important insights can still be obtained from further iconographic analysis of the available corpus of Uruk period images. One example will suffice to illustrate what I mean. As noted earlier, much of Uruk art deals with the activities of a larger-than-life bearded male figure, who wears his hair in a chignon and sports a net skirt. Typically depicted as a hunter of wild animals, as a leader in battle, as a fountain of agricultural wealth, and as the main officiator in various religious rituals (Schmandt-Besserat 1993, 2007; Bahrani 2002; Winter 2007), this individual is generally thought to represent a “priest-king” (Amiet 2005) or “city ruler” (Delougaz and Kantor 1996). This attribution is largely based on parallels between the manner in which he is depicted in Uruk art and the way historic Mesopotamian kings were later portrayed.1

While this interpretation is almost certainly correct in its broad claims, it begs the question of whether the institution of kingship as it existed in the earliest Mesopotamian cities differed in any substantive way from its better-documented later counterparts. It may be possible to begin to approach this question by modeling the activities of the iconic male figure at issue not only in terms of what later Mesopotamian kings and provincial governors are known to have done but also in terms of the strategies that rulers of ethnohistorically documented premodern states elsewhere are known to have used in their respective quests to solve their own collective action problem(s). In my opinion, the fastest—and possibly greatest—

payoff along these lines would come from extending the methodology of glyptic analysis that Dittmann pioneered in his analysis of the Susa sealings, noted in an earlier chapter, to other pertinent corpora of Uruk glyptic published since Dittmann’s study first appeared, most notably the materials from Chogha Mish (Delougaz and Kantor 1996), Tell Brak and other Uruk colonial sites in northern Syria (Pittman 2001) and, most importantly, from Warka itself (Boehmer 1999).

Paleoenvironment

Building on the prescient work of Frank Hole (1994), a central claim in this book has been that the environmental framework of fourthmillennium alluvial Mesopotamia was quite different from that which prevailed in the area in the historic periods and that this environment presented particularly propitious opportunities for human settlement that were recognized and exploited by early populations in the area. With some exceptions, however, this picture of conditions at the time early Sumerian societies became urban is based on extrapolations of large-scale climatological models and sedimentological research derived from areas outside the Mesopotamian alluvium itself (chap. 4). Helpful as these models are, they generally have neither the geographical nor chronological resolution that we would require to tackle issues of causality in human-environmental relations during the formative stages of Mesopotamian civilization.

From the point of view of palaeoclimatology, what is needed is a coordinated effort to incorporate available data into mesoscale computer simulation programs reconstructing climatic trends at specific crucial stages in the formation of Mesopotamian civilization. Particularly informative would be simulations focusing on conditions prevalent in the Tigris-Euphrates watershed (1) during the first quarter of the fourth millennium (Early Uruk), when available settlement pattern data (Adams 1981) show that southern Mesopotamia became a cauldron of competing statelets that, in the aggregate, was unparalleled elsewhere in the ancient Near East, and (2) during the third quarter of the millennium (Middle Uruk), when Warka starts growing exponentially and, perhaps not coincidentally, southern Mesopotamian polities first start to expand into the Upper Euphrates and Upper Tigris.

millennia. In the preceding chapters, I repeatedly argued that trade was a key transformative agent in the crystallization of early Sumerian urban societies. To be candid, however, at this stage of our knowledge, this assertion is more a proclamation of faith than a conclusion made necessary by evidence at hand, for claims presented here for the primacy of trade are not based on actual data showing increases in the movement of imports and exports between southern Mesopotamian societies and neighboring regions from the Ubaid through to the Uruk period, but are based instead on my explicit theoretical orientation concerning the root forces that generally underlie endogenous urban processes. To be sure, to judge from excavations at central sites such as Warka, there appears to be a substantial increase in the variety, and presumably frequency, of imports being brought into southern Mesopotamia from resource-rich highland areas during the Middle and Late Uruk periods compared to the preceding Ubaid period, but the data we have were mostly obtained from early excavations and are neither fully representative (below) nor fully published.3 Accordingly, existing data are not quantifiable in any reliable way.

The fact is that we will not know with certainty whether trade and its many social multiplier effects were a cause or a consequence of urban and state formation in Mesopotamia (chap. 6) until we start excavating some of the large urban sites through which such trade would have been funneled using the sorts of pioneering excavation methodologies and recording protocols used by Henry Wright at sites such as Farukhabad, in the Deh Luran plain of southwestern Iran, which were designed specifically to address whether (1) “Increased participation in exchange networks begins with . . . an increase in export rather than an initial increase in imports,” whether (2) “Increased participation in systems of export leads to increased administrative specialization and state formation,” and whether (3) “Increased participation in systems of export and import leads to the growth of central towns” (Wright 1981a, 3). Wright addressed these interrelated questions by careful sieving of all in situ deposits and by recording the relative densities of specific materials imported and exported into and from the site in terms of finds per cubic meter of excavated deposit per phase.4 This methodology points the way forward to assessing the importance of interregional trade to processes of urbanization and state formation at other Uruk period centers, possibly even at Warka itself. More specifically, even if used as a comple-