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Circumscription by Anthropogenic Environmental Destruction: An Expansion of Carneiro's (1970) Theory of the Origin of the State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

D. Bruce Dickson
D. Bruce Dickson*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843
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Abstract

Carneiro (1970) asserts that social and environmental "circumscription" were primary stimuli for the emergence of the archaic state. He presents the environment as an essentially fixed set of natural conditions which impose constraints upon society. However, paleoenvironmental research and contemporary experience indicate that desertification, deforestation, salinization, and other salient environmental conditions confronting early states were neither fixed nor natural, but apparently dynamic products of direct human ecological intervention. This paper reviews evidence from southern Mesopotamia and suggests that Carneiro's thesis be amended to include changing patterns of "artificial" circumscription brought about by anthropogenic environmental destruction.

Type
Articles
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , October 1987 , pp. 709 - 716
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1987

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