ABSTRACT
Archaeology has an anachronistic popular image. It suffers from Hollywood and lingering images of absent-minded professors digging in arid, remote lands, in the shadow of gold laden pyramids. It is often considered a romantic pastime, despite generations of serious television documentaries and National Geographic Magazine articles. Archaeology has morphed over generations into a team approach to studying history, albeit with artifacts and sites, animal bones, seeds, and environmental data as the archives, the tools if will, for examining fundamental issues of early history. More than 70 years ago, Gordon Childe described the origins of civilization as an “Urban Revolution.” How great a revolution it was, if it indeed was, has been the subject of debate ever since. There was no one overriding cause for the emergence of state-organized societies, rather a complex set of interacting processes that fostered greater social complexity, literacy, long-distance trade, and all the panoply of pre-industrial civilization.
