ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book is to examine the way archaeological data have been collected from early states to test whether systematic bias of the sort described by Eric Wolf (1982) might explain the identification of cross-cultural continuity in the status of women. This chapter discusses data taken from excavation of Indus cities of the second and third millennia BC, considered some of the earliest urban settlements in the world. Nevertheless, these communities lacked many of the material cultural markers archaeologists expect to see as evidence of organizational complexity. As with many other chapters in this book, the question of women’s role in early civilization invariably turns on definitions of “state,” “civilization,” and “urbanism,” and it becomes apparent that few states (if any) that predate the modern world system actually fit the definitions devised by cultural evolutionists.
