State history and economic development: evidence from six millennia

The presence of a state is one of the most reliable historical predictors of social and economic development. In this article, we complete the coding of an extant indicator of state presence from 3500 BCE forward for almost all but the smallest countries of the world today. We outline a theoretical framework where accumulated state experience increases aggregate productivity in individual countries but where newer or relatively inexperienced states can reach a higher productivity maximum by learning from the experience of older states. The predicted pattern of comparative development is tested in an empirical analysis where we introduce our extended state history variable. Our key finding is that the current level of economic development across countries has a hump-shaped relationship with accumulated state history

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes

Scaling the state: Egypt in the third millennium BC

Discussions of the early Egyptian state suffer from a weak consideration of scale. Egyptian archaeologists derive their arguments primarily from evidence of court cemeteries, elite tombs, and monuments of royal display. The material informs the analysis of kingship, early writing, and administration but it remains obscure how the core of the early Pharaonic state was embedded in the territory it claimed to administer. This paper suggests that the relationship between centre and hinterland is key for scaling the Egyptian state of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2,700-2,200 BC). Initially, central administration imagines Egypt using models at variance with provincial practice. The end of the Old Kingdom demarcates not the collapse, but the beginning of a large-scale state characterized by the coalescence of central and local models

Ceremonial plant consumption at Middle Bronze Age Büklükale, Kırıkkale Province, central Turkey

A shaft-like room at the Middle Bronze Age site of Büklükale in central Turkey preserved a rich archaeobotanical assemblage of charred and mineralised plant remains, dominated by fruits, spices and nuts mixed with probable bread and wood charcoals. The remains were recovered in association with numerous ceramic vessels, jewellery and exotic artefacts. We combine identification and analysis of the seeds and wood charcoals contained in this deposit with studies of Old Assyrian and Hittite textual records to investigate the circumstances of the assemblage’s formation and its significance for further understanding trade and plant consumption in Bronze Age Anatolia. We present the earliest archaeobotanical example in the region of rare and exotic plant species being consumed in the context of one or more social gatherings, including those possibly linked to ceremonial or ritual events. This offers new insights into the role of plants in the economic and social life of the southwest Asian Bronze Age, as well as the role of commensality and feasting in early states

Missing non-Western voices on social justice for education : a postcolonial perspective on traditions of marginalized communities

This chapter reviews the theories and development of a number of non-Western philosophical and legal social justice traditions that have been marginalized in the literature, adopting primarily a postcolonial perspective on how they can contribute to education, transcending colonizer distortions of knowledge to present and draw implications from bodies of knowledge that have been removed from the dominating international literature. This approach is accompanied by a critique of globalization that has, according to many authors, created a hegemonic position for primarily Anglo-American systems in this respect including the view of “epistemicide,” imperialism, “symbolic violence,” and neocolonization, particularly in relation to the right to culture as a social justice principle. Various forms of colonization, including that under the current globalization period, produce cultural hierarchies of values and knowledge, or even expunge cultural and knowledge traditions. This chapter examines selected humanistic traditions of social justice that have existed for centuries, long pre-dating the modern period, focusing on those that have suffered an injustice in their suppression and distortion through a Bourdieuian “symbolic” violence applying not only to the knowledge that is suppressed, expunged, or lost through colonization and globalization and the cultural and intellectual capital they carry but also the identities, values, and traditional social institutions from which they are derived. The first section examines the conceptions and practices of social justice established in ancient Mesopotamia that provides the historical foundation to many later systems. The second presents the Confucian system of social justice as a foundation to the just society that has informed administration, education, and the principles of justice of a number of countries consisting of equitable distribution, equal opportunities, the rights of individuals and the principle of equity. The next section examines the Islamic social justice tradition consisting of distributive, retributive, and fairness and equity and the aim of piety to correct injustices, individually and collectively and establish equal rights for women and men in many spheres and the role of education in emphasizing the role of mind in its critical and reasoning capacities and reason in the formation of character, morality, and the human community with a strong emphasis on education and becoming learned. Finally, a representative selection of indigenous systems of social justice are examined where principles of individual rights and obligations to others and nature carried with them obligations in how others are treated and cared for due to stronger collective rather than individualistic values