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Some Hypotheses on the Development of Early Civilizations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Robert M. Adams
Robert M. Adams*
Affiliation:
University of ChicagoChicago, Ill.
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , January 1956 , pp. 227 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1956

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Footnotes

*

This is a slightly modified version of a paper entitled “Institutional Patterns and the Development of Civilization,” which was read at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Bloomington, Indiana, on May 5, 1955. Some of the problems dealt with here are also touched on in a symposium on irrigation civilizations (Steward and others 1955) that appeared too late to be utilized.

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