Combining Social Sciences, Geoscience and Archaeology to Understand Societal Collapse

Despite its apparently obvious conclusion that adverse environmental conditions must produce economic and institutional crises, the 'collapse archaeology' literature has been criticized for its lack of a formal theory, a credible measurement strategy and a proper understanding of the roles of environmental shocks. To tackle this issue, we propose to combine a time inconsistency theory of state formation and evolution¿i.e., state-building, institutional proxies based on this model and highly granular simulated climate data. To clarify our proposal, we apply it to the study of state-building in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, and we show that moderate droughts shaped these economies directly via deteriorated production conditions as well as indirectly via institutional resilience

Understanding the decline of interpersonal violence in the ancient middle east

How did human societies succeed in reducing interpersonal violence, a precondition to achieve security and prosperity? Given that homicide records are only available for the more recent period, much of human history remains virtually outside our purview. To fill this gap, a literature intersecting economics, archaeology, and anthropology has devised reliable methods for studying traumas deliberately inflicted in human skeletal remains. In this paper we reconstruct the early history of conflict by exploiting a novel dataset on weapon-related wounds from skeletons excavated across the Middle East, spanning the whole pre-Classical period (ca. 8,000-400 BCE). By documenting when and how ancient Middle Eastern populations managed to reduce intersocietal violence and achieve remarkable levels of development, we broaden historical perspectives on the structural factors driving human conflict

NEARCHOS. Networked Archaeological Open Science: Advances in Archaeology Through Field Analytics and Scientific Community Sharing

The full release and circulation of excavation results often takes decades, thus slowing down progress in archaeology to a degree not in keeping with other scientific fields. The nonconformity of released data for digital processing also requires vast and costly data input and adaptation. Archaeology should face the cognitive challenges posed by digital environments, changing in scope and rhythm. We advocate the adoption of a synergy between recording techniques, field analytics, and a collaborative approach to create a new epistemological perspective, one in which research questions are constantly redefined through real-time, collaborative analysis of data as they are collected and/or searched for in an excavation. Since new questions are defined in science discourse after previous results have been disseminated and discussed within the scientific community, sharing evidence in remote with colleagues, both in the process of field collection and subsequent study, will be a key innovative feature, allowing a complex and real-time distant interaction with the scholarly community and leading to more rapid improvements in research agendas and queries

Endogenous (In)Formal Institutions.

Despite the huge evidence documenting the relevance of inclusive political institutions and a culture of cooperation, we still lack a framework that identifies their origins and interaction. In a model in which an elite and a citizenry try to cooperate in consumption risk-sharing and investment, we show that a rise in the investment value encourages the elite to introduce more inclusive political institutions to convince the citizenry that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments will be shared. In addition, accumulation of culture rises with the severity of consumption risk if this is not too large and thus cheating is not too appealing. Finally, the citizenry may over-accumulate culture to credibly commit to cooperate in investment when its value falls and so inclusive political institutions are at risk. These predictions are consistent with the evolution of activity-specific geographic factors, monasticism, and political institutions in a panel of 90 European regions spanning the 1000-1600 period. Evidence from several identification strategies suggests that the relationships we uncover are causal

Review of Karen L. Wilson, Bismaya, Recovering the Lost City of Adab (Oriental Institute Publications 138)

The article consists of a review of the final publication of the excavations carried out by the Oriental Institute of Chicago at Bismaya, ancient Adab, Iraq

On Reconstructing Past Economies and Lifeways: A View from the Ancient Near East (Review Article of: T.J. Wilkinson, McG. Gibson, M. Widell (eds.), 2013, Models of Mesopotamian Landscapes; P. Matthiae, N. Marchetti (eds.), 2013, Ebla and Its Landscape)

This essay consists of a review article of the following books: T.J. Wilkinson, McG. Gibson, M. Widell (eds.), Models of Mesopotamian Landscapes. How Small-scale Processes contributed to the Growth of Early Civilizations (BAR S2552). Pp. x+275, ISBN 9781407311739. Oxford, Archaeopress, 2013, \ua3 42; and P. Matthiae, N. Marchetti (eds.), Ebla and Its Landscape. Early State Formation in the Ancient Near East. Pp. 535, pls. 27, ISBN 9781611322286. Walnut Creek, CA, Left Coast Press, 2013, $ 149