Page 26 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

\
-2-

environment had apparently changed little during the past ten millennia, the
patterns noted in the archeological record were most certainly the result of
cultural processes.
This view of the natural environmental background generated an
exploration of far more sophisticated cultural theories to counter earlier
monocausal explanations. Irrigation agriculture was presented as a formative
influence by Wittfogel (1957) to explain the rise of the great urban centers of the
Near East. The actual study of the abandoned irrigation systems by Adams (1965),
however revised Wittfogel's ideas by noting that such systems were not greatly
developed at the time in question and that demographic changes were major
influences in the formation of the early urban centers of southern Iraq.
Oppenheim (1954) presented the role of mercantile activities as a
significant factor in early state formation. Thus, trade networks became a prime
candidate for other cultural variables in the evolution of major cultural centers.
Indeed, the role of exchange between human groups is a major factor. The
interrelationship of agricultural systems, demographic changes, exchange networks,
and urban development is a worthwhile and important topic for research.
Much of the emphasis on cultural explanation in Near Eastern archeology
is clearly related to a surge of research away from the simplistic environmental
views of the 1930s and 1940s. One is left with a gnawing doubt, however, when one
reads archeological syntheses of the 1970s directed toward the student reader that
rely almost exclusively on equally simplistic views of natural environmental
changes in the Near East (see for example Stigler 1975). There has been too little
geological research in the Near East pertaining to post-Pleistocene
paleoenvironments for one to base cultural generalities that assume static
conditions.
The geo morphologist is reminded of the parallel views during the 1950s
and early 1960s that considered post-Pleistocene climates to have been much like
the present (see for example Wright 1955). We now recognize significant periods of
climatic change and glaciation in the northern portions of the northern hemisphere
during the Holocene (Denton and Karlen 1973; Dansgaard et al. 1971; Morner 1976)