An Investigation of the Chronological Association Between Agricultural and Social Complexity

University Of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Archaeologists are well placed among scientists to answer questions of three kinds: What changes in the size and organization of human societies take place over the shorter or longer term? To what extent do cultural and non-human processes and events have an effect over different geographic scales? To what degree do deliberate socio-economic strategies achieve (or not) their explicit aims or prove counterproductive? All three of these questions are perennially important to policy-making, economics, diplomacy, risk management, and other applied social sciences. Michael Lane of the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) responds to all three in his proposed research. In collaboration with Greek and American colleagues, he proposes to answer specifically and generally relevant questions concerning what motives lay behind an technologically intensive agricultural endeavor over 3,000 years ago, whether it was initially organized by state institutions or a rather looser-knit association of communities, whether relevant hydraulic technology was largely a local innovation or adopted from abroad, how rapid the technological change was, whether and how attendant political and economic institutions kept pace, and the extent to which the agricultural intensification successfully addressed an issue - for example, population pressure or external demand - without raising some other undesirable social or economic cost. Answers to these questions have clear contemporary relevance, covering such issues as feeding the world's growing population, building political and economic capacity, and transferring relevant technologies. The project will also provide training for the next generation of American researchers, including UMBC undergraduates and an American interdisciplinary geological archaeology post-doctoral fellow. The Late Bronze Age was a time in the wider Eastern Mediterranean of the emergence of state institutions in societies on the periphery of pre-existing kingdoms in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Lane's research will be carried out in the Kopaic Basin in Greece, where, during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700-1100 BCE) the region's inhabitants realized a colossal drainage and land reclamation project, involving 15 miles of channeled rivers, together with dikes to prevent re-flooding. He has discovered a vast, largely intact buried landscape of cultivated fields evidently irrigated through the drainage system. Prior studies indicate that the most recent construction of the drainage works dates to about 1300 BCE. Lane's preliminary results indicate that the fields were created as early as 1700 BCE. The consensus is that state institutions are required for orchestrating such work, yet no indication of these is found earlier than about 1500 BCE. Hence a period of two centuries exists that needs to be reevaluated either for evidence of a centralized state or, conversely, of the social capacity to realize such a technological feat without central authority and administrative bodies. The discrepancy between newly obtained and consensus dates bears important implications for understanding possible interconnections among local and regional Late Bronze Age socio-economic developments, including whether the relevant technology was mostly indigenous or introduced, whether the undertaking was mainly a response to internal stimuli or external interests, and whether it was viable over the long term. Lane's proposal, involving side-by-side employment of well-established carbon-14 and luminescence dating methods with state-of-the-art shell amino-acid racemization dating - widely used in crime scene investigation and also applied in archaeology - will not only address these important concerns but also lead to potential methodological improvements in multiple areas of research.