Chipped stone, tools, and towns: An archaeological study of Uruk period lithic production and use at Abu Salabikh, Iraq

This research investigates relations between economic structure and technology at a fourth millennium B.C. Uruk period town, with the goal of understanding how the productive enterprises of a particular town shaped the technological strategies of its residents. The Uruk period was characterized by a marked increase in the number of settlements in the alluvial lowlands and a contraction of population into towns, some of which relied on tribute and repressive control of surrounding communities. Because at least one town remained unoccupied after the fourth millennium, an understanding of economic activities and their contexts, obtained from a study of discarded tools and the byproducts of their manufacture---especially the distribution of imported chipped stone resources in relation to different social contexts---will shed light not only on the nature of Uruk towns in a particular locale, but also on how status, consumption, production, and technology are configured. This study provides an alternative to traditional archaeological perspectives on economic structure that begin by relating types of production and exchange to settlements hierarchically grouped in a regional settlement pattern. Informed by detailed information on economic activities and strategies, particularly consumption, the perspective advocated here focuses instead on the properties and forms of implements in relation to their use by people to do work, arguing that the conditions and circumstances that sustain production and consumption of tools are linked to the material and social relations of agriculture and animal husbandry of specific populations. Three lines of evidence---edge wear analysis of stone tools, manufacturing profiles, and spatial distributions of tools and manufacturing byproducts---were used to evaluate this argument focusing on one town, which is part of a cluster of similar-sized settlements in the Nippur-Adab region of southern Mesopotamia.