The Development of Administration from Collective to Centralized Economies in the Mesopotamian World

Abstract

In his article, “The Cultural Evolution of Civilization” (1972), Flannery proposed a timeless model for analyzing the processes of social change, which he claimed was able to provide instruments for a general interpretation of “universal evolutionary mechanisms and processes” leading to the rise of state societies. Flannery’s proposal, like most of his scientific contributions, raised fundamental issues encompassing theoretical/conceptual aspects and methodological considerations of importance. One can criticize the excessive confidence he then placed in the capacity of wholly abstract and mechanistic models to offer a universal explanation of historical processes, typical of systems theory that had become fashionable in those yewars. Yet some social interaction mechanisms and the underlying function of certain institutional forms that he had identified when building that model have provided useful analytical tools for investigating substantial aspects of the processes leading to the emergence of the state.Furthermore, the historical concreteness always implicit in the way Flannery properly used the comparative approach when constructing even his most abstract generalizations* made his contribution essential reading for more than one generation of scholars, even those belonging to different theoretical schools.

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In my opinion, a sound comparative method must always be based on a thorough examination of the under lying structural aspects of the societies or processes being compared. In other words, for the comparison to be meaningful, it must not be based on superficial formal elements. This requires a historical process-based study of all the individual component parts being analyzed.