Some Hypotheses on the Development of Early Civilizations

Abstract

Gross parallels in patterns of development of early civilizations have long invited closer inspection. Attempts to formulate these processes of growth into a single general statement of cause and effect have been out of fashion in anthropology for many years now, but interest has remained high in the general problem of comparison. Leaving aside studies concerned particularly with progressive changes in styles or technologies, the greatest promise seems to attach currently to studies focused on the growing network of formal, supra-kin institutions which characterized each of the early civilizations for which archaeological or historic documentation exists.The approach taken here has much in common with that of V. Gordon Childe (1942, 1952), and certainly leans heavily on the rich store of archaeological insight he has made available for the Old World.