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Tate Paulette
7.7. Cereal fields near the village of Hamoukar in northeastern Syria. The Tur Abdin
Mountains of Turkey are visible in the distance, and to the right a gas flare burns off
waste material from an oil well. Photo by Amanda Schupak.
First, it is crucial that we pay careful attention to the effects and the effectiveness
of different institutional forms. Over the course of the Bronze Age,
Mesopotamia witnessed the rise and fall of a number of distinct systems of
centralized political and economic organization. In some cases (e.g., the Ur III
state), centralized control was tight and regional economic integration carefully
orchestrated; in others (e.g., the Old Babylonian period), private entrepreneurs
and agents played a stronger role, and the institutions managed the
economy less closely. Throughout the Bronze Age the institutional powers
regularly made efforts to prevent and combat environmental hazards, but in
many cases their practices also contributed to the creation or exacerbation of
hazards (e.g., soil salinization and channel shift).
In the modern world, when natural disasters strike, the inadequacy of
institutional (i.e., state-organized) responses is often painfully obvious. One
need only recall, for example, controversies over the US government’s response
to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
There is a pressing need to fine-tune our own institutional structures, developing
ways to increase their flexibility and the speed of their responses. In these
efforts to improve the functioning of our institutions, the archaeological and
historical records provide an invaluable, but largely untapped, resource. They
offer the chance to examine countless examples of successful and unsuccessful
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