This book is ambitious in scope and breadth. Written by an economist (Gregory K. Dow) and an economic historian (Clyde G. Reed), it covers roughly 10,000 years of human history with the explicit goal of using economic models drawn from microeconomics to offer causal mechanisms for six major transitions: sedentism, farming, inequality, warfare, cities, and states. The authors aim this book squarely at archaeologists, and they describe how economists use formal models to investigate a problem. The book includes math to describe their formal models: readers who are unfamiliar with limits, equilibriums, and other mathematical principles and processes should not be deterred, because the authors present all their models and explanations in straightforward, clear language. Throughout the book, the authors give signposts to what can be skipped, should the reader want to get to the verbal recitations and explanations of each model.
Many archaeologists are going to be skeptical of any endeavor like this one that uses Malthusian population dynamics and insights drawn from Douglass North and coauthors about marginal returns as the basis for models about major transitions (Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, “The First Economic Revolution,” Economic History Review 30[2]:229–241, 1977). Those who are skeptical of neo-evolutionary models in particular will object to some of the key assumptions: rational actors, population as an endogenous factor in centuries-long equilibria, and the centrality of climate shock and geography to transitions. Rational actors in their models are not rational per se, but they act as an averaging force over many generations. Dow and Reed’s later assumptions about elites versus commoners in their formulations of processes that produce inequality, warfare, and even cities and states have a similar structure. This is, ultimately, an explicitly materialist model; resources that exist in place are essential for the institutionalization of power, hierarchies, and complex political forms. Most of us make assumptions, with considerably less clarity, about the roles of climate, population pressure, technology, and other variables in much shorter timeframes than those on which Dow and Reed are focused. The transitions examined by the authors have occurred on timescales spanning centuries and even millennia, and these long-term time spans shift the dependent variables from population (for example) in their model to climate.
Dow and Reed make a great effort, using concise writing, to set up their parameters in a way that makes them easy to read. They devote a whole section to explaining Malthusian population dynamics. Much of the modeling that follows hinges on these economic concepts, so careful reading at the beginning will make the rest more explicable, whether readers agree with their models and explanations or not.
Even when I was skeptical about assumptions for a particular transition in a specific area, I found that their formal models have insights that are worthwhile to consider. For example, most archaeologists believe that climate played an oversized role in our transitions into sedentism and, later, agriculture. The authors’ analysis highlights key assumptions about cultivation practices and offers suggestions as to why this explanation fits the data from some geographic areas (or why it does not). They consistently link climate change and power dynamics as the causal mechanisms in a simple economic model for transitions to sedentism. I summarize here my understanding of their main arguments for each transition, although space precludes more detailed commentary.
For sedentism, the authors argue that climate shocks in more productive regions led to the transition to staying put in refuge areas. This, in turn, meant that populations would aggregate where plant cultivation would eventually exceed the marginal product of foraging and gathering. They also argue that learning by doing made cultivation slightly more productive in the long run. According to this argument, population pressure on resources is, by itself, insufficient to explain the permanence of farming, because sedentary foraging is deemed less productive than plant cultivation.
Dow and Reed link inequality explicitly to sedentism, and they argue that institutionalized inequality results from single groups controlling specific resources or places. They further reason that warfare would be common among elite-dominated groups but rare among egalitarian groups. This does not explain the violence observable in the Late Pleistocene, but the application of the concept of diminishing marginal returns to identify group-level reasons for engaging in or avoiding warfare is a novel approach. Collective action is not the explicit model they consider here, although they state that groups (hunter-gatherers and emergent elites within sedentary societies) overcome common obstacles to act as one. As with many formal models, one could argue that factions are implicit here in a way that is not made completely clear.
On the topic of the emergence of early cities and states, Dow and Reed argue that climate shifts pushed populations into elite-controlled areas, where aggregate manufacturing sectors arose from which those self-same elites could exercise taxation and control. This model is questionable for Mesopotamia (where the authors develop their theory) because the type of control required to exercise this monopoly on power is not persuasive. It is useful to recall here that they are not really talking (much) about what happened after 5000 BP, despite their final chapter’s brief foray into modern climate issues.
There were some sections, particularly those on cities and states, where citations were missing. The authors made choices about sources that were neither thorough nor complete. Readers will not find lengthy or exhaustive bibliographies about the archaeology of the case studies considered in this book.
Economic Prehistory nevertheless is successful in demonstrating the value of developing formal economic models by applying a few key concepts to understanding major transitions in human societies, which help generate hypotheses about causal mechanisms that are worth consideration, debate, and argument.
