ABSTRACT
The relationships between political organisation, its evolution and specialist craft production can be highly variable, and the causal mechanisms are still debated among interpretive archaeologists, processualists and evolutionary archaeologists (e.g., Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Clark and Parry 1990; Costin 1991; DeMarrais et al. 1996; Henrich and Boyd 2008; Patterson 2005; Rice 1981; Shepard 1956, 1963). In early state societies, luxuries intended for the social or political arena (e.g., Sinopoli 1988), as well as more mundane commodities such as plain utilitarian pottery, were subject to various mechanisms of centralised political control. Third-millennium BC cuneiform evidence, for instance, documents a meticulously overseen ceramic industry in southern Mesopotamia of the Ur III period (Potts 1997). Inspired by these rare, as well as historically and culturally contingent, glimpses of a centralised production organisation, archaeological evidence is also often interpreted to this effect (e.g., Sillar, this volume; Sterling 2001; see Blackman et al. 1993 for an exception). Middle Assyrian imperial control over production has been inferred from the presence, in state-related find contexts, of a restricted repertoire of plain utilitarian pottery, which is standardised in appearance and assumed to be the result of mass production (Pfälzner 1995).
