excavations conducted in the 1940 s at the core of Tell Uqair (Lloyd and Safar 1943 )
and Eridu (Safar, Mustafa, and Lloyd 1981 ), which mirror the more extensive data from
the core of Uruk and thus add little to our understanding of the period, or excavations
into sites such as Nippur (Hansen 1965 ), Ur (Wooley 1955 ), and Tello (Parrot 1948 ),
which sampled Uruk period levels but were either so limited in extent so as to produce
little information beyond ceramic chronologies (Nippur) or were conducted in such a
haphazard fashion as to be largely irrelevant for scholarly use (Ur and Tello). Even more
galling is the fact that after a century or so of systematic exploration in southern
Mesopotamia, research designs that were massively biased from the beginning toward
the recovery of elite architecture and artifacts mean that we still have almost no
systematic explorations of Uruk period villages or hamlets away from the larger
regional centers.^1
A further bias must still be discussed. Because of the shortcomings just noted of
existing archaeological data for the Uruk period, Mesopotamian scholars often put
much stock on available textual documentation for the period and its immediate
aftermath, which consists of a corpus of 5 , 000 plus “Archaic Texts” excavated in Eanna
IV–III levels at Warka (Englund 1998 ) and of an undetermined number of paleo-
graphically comparable tablets excavated or, more commonly, plundered from other
southern Mesopotamian sites (Englund 2009 : footnote 11 ). However, this data is also
problematic in its own way. To begin with, the tablets date only to the very final phase
of the Uruk period and shed no light whatsoever on the beginnings of the urban
revolution in the area, which began much earlier (below). Moreover, even at Warka,
only a handful of the thousands of tablets and tablet fragments recovered were found
in primary contexts, so that it is difficult to associate any particular information
contained in the texts with any particular institution at that site (Englund 1994 : 11 – 19 ).
Mindful that our data for reconstructing developments in southern Mesopotamia
in the Uruk period are not always complementary and are hopelessly partial, we may
tentatively forge ahead with an attempt – necessarily imperfect – to create a narrative
of sorts about the origins of early Mesopotamian civilization. By necessity, that
narrative focuses on what we cansay with the data we dohave.
THE EVIDENCE FROM SURVEYS: URUK PERIOD SPATIAL
AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION
Available survey evidence suggests that the transition between the Uruk and the imme-
diately preceding Ubaid periods was rather abrupt throughout the Mesopotamian
alluvium (Nissen 1988 : 66 ). To be sure, there is no way to know for certain whether this
abruptness reflects an actual demographic pattern, or whether, at least in part, it reflects
accidents of discovery due to changes in the rate and intensity of geomorphological
forces that obscured site visibility in the alluvium between the two periods, or both.
Perhaps because of this caveat, in his analysis of long-term settlement trends in the
southern Mesopotamian alluvium, Robert McCormick Adams ( 1981 : 54 – 60 ) was
unwilling to characterize the nature of pre-Uruk settlement in the Mesopotamian
alluvium in detail, limiting himself to noting that in general the density of pre-Uruk
sites is very light and declines northwards from the head of the gulf, that most pre-
Uruk settlements represented but small hamlets or villages, and that larger settlements
were not attested in the alluvium until the end of the Ubaid period (end of the fifth–– Guillermo Algaze ––