Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa

Debt and inequality: Comparing the “means of specification” in the early T

cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization
Adam S. Green
University of Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: To transform debts into permanent inequalities, David Graeber (2011:14) argues that creditors must possess the
Debt “means to specify” what they are owed. Therefore, changes in the technologies used to specify can transform
Inequality social relations, warranting a deeper investigation of what are effectively the “means of specification.” Seals and
Exchange sealings from the early cities of South Asia and the Near East are a touchstone for comparing changes in the
Reciprocity
means of specification. I examine seals and sealings from Mesopotamia, where a managerial ruling class held
Information
Seals and sealings
power, and the Indus civilization, where urbanism thrived under relatively egalitarian conditions. Seals and
Complex society sealings did not inevitably fuel inequality. In Mesopotamia, it was only after millennia of control by exclusionary
Comparative archaeology and often violent political institutions that the ruling class used the means of specification to establish interest-
Indus civilization bearing debt, a form of “extractive reciprocity” that transferred value to creditors in an ongoing social relation.
Mesopotamia In the Indus, where there was no such ruling class, seals remained readily accessible and widely distributed,
sustaining “balanced reciprocity” (Sahlins, 1972:194) in intensifying urban settings. While changes in the means
of specification can create permanent inequalities, they can also help delay the completion of transactions until
equitable conditions prevail.

1. Introduction “relations of specification” – how control of those technologies was

Debt lurks in the shadow of reciprocity. It is an ethnographic uni-
versal, incurring varying degrees of moral rectitude or lapse across
cultures (Peebles, 2010, p. 234). In Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, the term
‘debt’ is used to describe the most pernicious kind of obligation–that
which, if unfulfilled, can result in slavery (Mauss, 1925, p. 54). Given
this potential to upset distributions of wealth and power, people have
created an array of different strategies for delaying or preventing the
completion of exchanges in order to establish and maintain social re-
lations (e.g. Bourdieu, 1972; Graeber, 2011; Guyer, 2004; Mauss, 1925;
Millhauser, 2017; Peebles, 2010; Sahlins, 1972; Weiner, 1992). In Debt:
the first 5,000 years, David Graeber (2011, p. 63) argues that permanent
economic inequalities emerge when the payment of certain debts that
could conceivably be paid back are permanently forestalled, creating a
predatory social relation that extracts wealth from debtors and deposits
it with creditors. The formation of such inequalities is contingent on
materializing information about what was exchanged to whom, which
requires creditors to possess the “means to specify” what they are owed
and the ability to force collection through violence (2011, p. 14).
Therefore, changes in how the material technologies used to specify
worked can generate permanent inequalities, which warrants a close
investigation of the “means of specification” and especially the
distributed in society. The means of specification are found in all so-
cieties, and include all of the material tools used to represent specific
people, goods, places, and intervals of time. Critically, people use the
means of specification to store, utilize, and transmit different kinds of
information. Quantification is one potential feature of the means of
specification, but they can also include tools for specifying the names of
particular people, the involvement of those people in a particular
transaction, and the circumstances under which a transaction occurred.
Graeber based his analysis on historical texts and ethnography,
positing that a combination of violence and specification was nearly
universal, but the time span covered by his sources was far from uni-
versal. Archaeology can help bridge this gap, allowing us to examine
this proposition deeper in the past. Engraved seals and the impressed
clay sealings they could be used to create constitute a touchstone in the
long-term development of the means of specification in the early so-
cieties of South Asia and the Near East (Fig. 1). Seals were engraved
with imagery and/or inscribed with text that could be copied by
pressing them into clay, creating sealings for containers and structures
(e.g. Ferioli and Fiandra, 1983). The use of this technology produces
glyptic datasets comprised of both seals and the sealings made from
them (Pittman, 1994). Sealings allowed people to materialize in-
formation about the moment they were created, which made them

E-mail address: ag952@cam.ac.uk.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101232
Received 1 November 2019; Received in revised form 31 August 2020
Available online 09 October 2020
0278-4165/ © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
A.S. Green
Fig. 1. Map indicating the locations of sites discussed in the text. Data are projected in WSG 1984 on version 4.0 of the Natural Earth Basemap using QGIS 3.8.
useful in many different forms of social interaction. Seals and sealings
could serve multiple religious, communicative, ideological and sym-
bolic purposes (e.g. Ameri et al., 2018; Collon, 1993; Costello, 2011;
McMahon, 2009; Oates, 1996; Porada, 1993; Winter, 1987). They ar-
guably allowed their users to transform what were potentially unique
and textured social interactions into graphical representations that
were highly schematized and conventionalized. This capacity made
them especially important to exchange because they allowed people to
record the circumstances of particular material transactions. By the
third millennium B.C., seals and sealings featured prominently in the
material cultures of Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, and South Asia
(e.g. Ameri et al., 2018; Pittman, 1995; Tsouparopoulou, 2014), taking
on a range of new complex forms. In Mesopotamia, powerful exclu-
sionary political institutions–temples and palaces–used seals and seal-
ings as part of a broader set of ‘administrative’ practices, materializing
information about taxes and payments (e.g. Frangipane et al., 2007;
Gibson and Biggs, 1991; Matthews, 1999; Nissen, 1977; Pittman, 1994;
Reichel, 2001, Rothman, 2007; Zettler, 1987), strategies that enabled a
managerial ruling class to extract wealth from subordinated social
classes, often incorporating a combination of quantification and vio-
lence (e.g. Frangipane et al., 2007; Nissen, 1977; Pollock, 1999).
Seals and sealings are thus considered to have been administrative
technologies, but they actually originated in the Neolithic, long before
the exclusionary political and economic institutions of the Bronze Age
emerged (e.g. Costello, 2011; Duistermaat, 2013; Peperaki, 2016).
Moreover, it is now clear that a ruling class of managerial elites is not a
prerequisite for social complexity. In South Asia, the Indus civilization
(c. 2600–1900 BC) developed a large-scale, intensified and specialized
Bronze Age economy in the absence of such a ruling class (Green,
2
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
2020). However, seals and sealings were also widely used in the rela-
tively egalitarian cities of the Indus, indicating that similar transfor-
mations in the means to specify have occurred in egalitarian and in-
egalitarian social contexts and raising critical questions about why they
sometimes fueled permanent inequalities. It would therefore seem that
early transformations in the means of specification do not necessarily
bring about the inegalitarian social relations that enable creditors to
establish and maintain wealth inequalities. Exerting control over in-
formation can bring about new forms of exchange, which can in turn
radically modify the distribution of power and wealth (e.g. Algaze,
1993, 2008; Costin, 1991; D’Altroy and Earle, 1985; Earle, 1982; Earle
and Ericson, 1977; Hirth, 2013; Trigger, 2003; Wright and Johnson,
1975). However, materializing information can enable people to
equalize the distribution of wealth just as easily as it can foster in-
equalities.
In this article, I compare studies of Mesopotamian and Indus seal
and sealing assemblages, focusing on their role in the early cities that
flourished in the fourth and third millennia B.C. (Fig. 1, Table 1). These
transformations in the means of specification likely fostered the in-
tensification of social interaction, allowing people to learn about and
remember their obligations to one another, particularly strangers. In
Mesopotamia, glyptic assemblages include far more sealings than seals,
are often made of harder stones, and are closely associated with the
exclusionary political institutions of the ruling class, while in the Indus,
seals are made of softer stones, substantially outnumber sealings, and
are most often associated with ordinary households. In Mesopotamia,
the means to specify were often restricted to a ruling class, paving the
way for the advent of tablets that recorded interest-bearing debts (e.g.
Hudson and Van de Mieroop, 2002). By contrast, in the Indus, the
A.S. Green
Table 1
Approximate chronology of the regions discussed in this article. The advent of urbanization indicated in grey. Adapted and simplified from Pollock (1999), Possehl
(2002), Ur (2010) and Wright (2010).
means of specification were widely distributed, allowing diverse cor-
porate groups to intensify social interaction in early urban settings
while also maintaining relative wealth equality. Thus, I suggest that in
inegalitarian political economies, ruling elites have a strong interest in
using the means of specification to mask “extractive reciprocity”, cycles
of exchange that transfer wealth from one party to another but also
ensnare the subordinate party in an ongoing social relation, an ar-
rangement that can make debts permanently unpayable. Conversely, in
egalitarian political economies, the means of specification can under-
gird what Sahlins (1972:194) called “balanced reciprocity,” delaying
the completion of transactions and perhaps even forestalling the es-
tablishment of an exclusionary ruling class.
2. Debt and extractive reciprocity
Economic anthropology investigates the role of exchange within
different socio-cultural contexts to ascertain patterns and regularities
(Hann and Hart, 2011). Here the term ‘exchange’ encompasses the full
range of social interactions that transfer goods, people, ideas or in-
formation between different individuals or groups. Exchanges often
involve groups of people who share a common right to utilize a parti-
cular accumulation of goods. Even today’s billionaires exert agency
through vast networks of corporate holdings that involve numerous
people. Thus the concept of ‘corporate group,’ a social group with a
common pool of material or symbolic property, is well-suited to de-
scribing the social entities who engage in exchanges across the vast and
varied spectrum of human experience (e.g. Goodenough, 1978; Green,
2020; McIntosh, 2005). Corporate groups are not necessarily legal
persons in the Western sense. Rather, different kinds of corporate
groups are found across cultures and, on a conceptual level, may better
represent the parties to exchange than individuals. The most common
form of corporate group is the household–which can of course take
different forms across cultures–but states, guilds, sodalities, and tem-
ples can all constitute different kinds of corporate groups that can
participate in exchange.
Reciprocity is a feature of all forms of exchange. This is because
there is a cross-cultural sense that receiving obligates you to give
(Graeber, 2011; Mauss, 1925; Sahlins, 1972). Value–the definition of
which is one of the most contentious issues in the academy (e.g.
Appadurai, 1986; Graeber, 2001; Harvey, 1982; Marx, 1976; Piketty,
3
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
2014; Polanyi, 1944; Simmel, 1978; Weiner, 1992)–should be returned
after it has been received. By creating a sense that the spirit of the gift
must return to the giver, gift cycles enmesh giver and receiver into
ongoing social relations, and the time that elapses between gift and
return thus makes possible a range of different social strategies (Mauss,
1925). The degree to which exchange creates ongoing social relations
on the one hand and transfers commodities on the other has long been
of interest to anthropologists (Baron and Millhauser, 2020). The ex-
change of commodities in markets is often considered to be diame-
trically opposed to reciprocity. In the most de-humanized of market
contexts, reciprocity is conspicuous by its suppression, which must be
morally justified (Graeber, 2011, pp. 113–120). Reciprocity is thus
generally thought to encompass a wider range of social interactions
than the market exchanges that shape capitalist economies (Gregory,
1982; Gudeman, 2001; Hann and Hart, 2011; Malinowski, 1922; Mauss,
1925; Sahlins, 1972; Strathern, 1988).
Polanyi (1957) argued that in its primordial form, long-distance
exchange served to establish alliances amongst the ruling classes of
early non-capitalist societies, and that the economic transformations
that ultimately brought about contemporary capitalism dis-embedded
exchange from these elite reciprocities (Polanyi, 1944). Polanyi’s di-
chotomy between capitalist and pre-capitalist societies was overly
simplistic (e.g. Feinman and Garraty, 2010; Oka and Kusimba, 2008),
but the idea that exchange was embedded within a holistic range of
social considerations has been useful. One result is a growing recogni-
tion that “human economies” make the world of things accommodate
the world of people (Graeber, 2011, Hart 2011). Human economies
oppose but also interdigitate market-driven ‘commercial economies,’
which increase the accumulation of things for their own sake (Graeber,
2011, p. 130). Graeber identified the possession of specific information
by creditors as essential to transforming human into commercial
economies, which makes how information accumulates in social groups
vitally important to exchange. However, the materialization of in-
formation is not limited to societies with pronounced wealth inequal-
ities–the means of specification vary across different societies, and can
change through time.
Accumulation in commercial economies is supposedly driven by the
goal of individual market participants to attain more value than they
lose through exchange, a feature that may characterize trade more
broadly (e.g. Oka and Kusimba, 2008). Money, a distinguishing feature
A.S. Green
of commercial economies, plays a crucial role in moving value around
by generating equivalence between disparate kinds of goods and con-
verting value into different forms (Appadurai, 1986; Baron, 2018;
Graeber, 2001; Gudeman, 2001; Hart, 2001; Parry and Bloch, 1989).
Money is certainly a key component of the means of specification,
however complex inegalitarian and egalitarian political economies long
predate the use of coinage, and money as a medium of exchange. To
understand how the means of specification shaped and were shaped by
early political economies, a consideration of reciprocity remains vital,
because the perception of fairness is vital to repeated exchange. For
value differentials to become permanent in an ongoing social re-
lationship, fairness must be undermined. These changes in reciprocity
may be detectable in the means to specify, and the early complex so-
cieties that stretched from Mesopotamia to South Asia all incorporated
a common technology–seals and sealings.
Reciprocity and the means of specification must therefore be closely
related. To understand exactly how, I find it useful to expand upon
Sahlins’ (1972, pp. 194–199) continuum of reciprocal exchanges. On
one side is “generalized reciprocity,” exchanges that create solidarity
within a social group by establishing unmonitored flows of goods with
an unspecified obligation to reciprocate. Sahlins’ generalized re-
ciprocity is not to be confused with Levi-Strauss’ theory of marriage-
alliances, for which the term échange généralisé was employed (e.g. Lévi-
Strauss, 1969). Instead, Sahlins (1972, pp. 194) identified voluntary
food-sharing amongst close kin as the archetypical form of generalized
reciprocity, though ‘hospitality’ and ‘generosity’ also describe forms of
generalized reciprocity. One of the defining characteristics of general-
ized reciprocity is a lack of specificity regarding the counter-obligation.
Indeed, in generalized reciprocity, a direct material return, such as from
a child to a parent, would be “unseemly.” “Balanced reciprocity,” on the
other hand, creates ongoing social relations between different social
groups precisely by specifying what was exchanged. Exchanges may
incorporate elements of both balanced and generalized reciprocity,
especially as social boundaries are left unspecified or porous. For ex-
ample, in Western societies, monetary transfers can serve to increase
social intimacy with extended family members (e.g. Zelizer 2000), and
it has long been argued that feasts can underscore status differences
between host and guest (e.g. Dietler and Hayden, 2010). However, both
of these exceptions prove the value of maintaining distinctions between
generalized reciprocity within and balanced reciprocity between cor-
porate groups. In the first instance, monetary transfers between ex-
tended family members acknowledge an inchoate social boundary,
while feasts can contextualize guests within the internal status hier-
archy of the host’s corporate group. “Negative reciprocity” occurs when
exchange is singular, anonymous and asymmetrical, characterizing
parties who have no interest in an ongoing social relation. Anonymous
transactions among perfect strangers in a market, in which both parties
seek maximum return and neither seek a follow up exchange, are the
archetypical form of negative reciprocity.
Sahlins’ reciprocity continuum does not neatly align with Graeber’s
discussion of debt, and the mismatches between them highlight a cri-
tical theoretical lacuna; there must be a pernicious form of “extractive”
reciprocity between balanced and negative (Fig. 2). After all, the ex-
emplary form of Graeber’s debt, predicated as it is on specification and
violence, is not negative reciprocity–ephemeral one-off transactions
between strangers–as it requires an ongoing extractive social relation-
ship. Like negative reciprocity, extractive reciprocity redistributes value
from one party to another, but unlike negative reciprocity, it also en-
snares the subordinate party into an ongoing relation. Like balanced
reciprocity, it uses and can thus transform the means to specify, but
rather than materializing information to sustain equality between dif-
ferent social groups, it uses the means of specification to present the
appearance of fairness, an ideological appeal that legitimizes and soli-
difies permanent wealth inequalities.
Recognizing extractive reciprocity addresses two theoretical pro-
blems. First, it corrects the misconception that specification is
4
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
inherently linked to negative reciprocity, and thus brings about per-
manent inequalities. Rather, the means of specification serve ongoing
relations between different social groups that can be either extractive or
balanced. Just as money accumulates many different uses, some of
which reinforce debt (e.g. Baron, 2018; Gudeman, 2001; Graeber, 2011;
Parry and Bloch, 1989), while others have the potential to bring about a
more equal future (e.g. Hart, 2001), materializing information can help
people remember their obligations and delay the completion of a
transaction to sustain balanced reciprocity. Of course, creditors can
conceivably draw upon the same means of specification in pursuit of
extraction, which by virtue of association between the means of spe-
cification and balanced reciprocity, can endow what are in fact unequal
social relations with a guise of fairness. This is particularly important to
collecting debt payments that require the coercive intervention of the
state (e.g. Graeber, 2011, p. 14). After all, debts cannot lead to per-
manent wealth inequalities if there are no means to force collection, so
extractive reciprocity may be contingent on the intervention of coercive
political institutions.
In the deep past, it is reasonable to suggest that as people engaged in
ever more frequent and diverse transactions–as would be the case in an
emerging complex society–they must have developed new technologies
for monitoring and recording these transactions to ensure that ex-
changes do not differentially benefit one of the parties involved. We
would therefore expect the means of specification to be shaped by
moral imperatives to keep transactions on the balanced side of the re-
ciprocity continuum. Preserving information about an exchange can
equalize transactions by specifying exactly what was exchanged and
when, and making an exchange fair is crucial if there is an expectation
that parties will maintain ongoing social relations. We can trace the
emergence of both forms of reciprocity by comparing transformations
in seals and sealings in Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization.
3. The means of specification in Mesopotamia
The earliest seals and sealings appeared in the agricultural villages
that emerged from the Near East to South Asia in the seventh millen-
nium B.C. (e.g. Collon, 1993; Duistermaat, 2013, 2012; Kenoyer and
Meadow, 2008, 2010; Pittman, 1995). The technology originated in
communication practices that incorporated clay to reproduce different
visual forms (e.g. Oates, 1996; Schmandt-Besserat, 1990, 1996;
Wengrow, 1998). At Tell Sabi Abyad, a well-preserved Neolithic village
in northern Mesopotamia, approximately 3 seals and 300 clay sealings
that were impressed with geometric and caprine motifs, have been re-
covered from storage rooms in a single structure (Duistermaat, 1996).
Tell Sabi Abyad’s excavators argued that this pattern highlights inter-
actions between sedentary communities who stored the sealings, and
mobile pastoralist who carried the seals (Akkermans and Duistermaat,
1996; Duistermaat, 2012). Thus, in one of their first major appearances,
seals and sealings likely served to balance reciprocity between agri-
culturalists and pastoralists separated by emerging social boundaries
(e.g. Akkermans and Duistermaat 1996:28). In later periods too, it has
been argued that seals and sealings were used in interactions between
agricultural and pastoral social groups throughout the Near East (e.g.
Alizadeh, 1988). A similar pattern–large numbers of sealings and small
numbers of seals–appears in assemblages from other Neolithic com-
munities throughout Mesopotamia (Tsouparopoulou, 2014, pp. 46–48).
As Near Eastern settlements increased in size and complexity, seals
and sealings took on increasingly important roles within emerging
political hierarchies. For example, during the Ubaid to Uruk transition
at Tepe Gawra, (ca. 4300–3700 BC), there were changes in seal and
sealing distribution and seal image composition as the political orga-
nization of the settlements fell under the control of new political in-
stitutions (Rothman, 2007). Whereas in earlier levels seals and sealings
were found evenly dispersed throughout the site, in the later levels
associated with emergent large-scale hierarchical political institutions
such as temples, seals and sealings were concentrated in specialized
A.S. Green
Fig. 2. A modified diagram of Sahlins’ (1972) continuum of reciprocity. Extractive reciprocity, class boundaries, and the means to specify have been added.
buildings (Rothman, 2002). Many of the seals carried representative
imagery, and seals associated with particularly large institutions seem
to directly depict images associated with production and authority,
such as scenes of predation and lines of herd animals (Rothman, 2007,
p. 245), which contrast with geometric motifs or images of schematized
caprines seen on the sealings at seen in the village storage structure at
Tell Sabi Abyad (e.g. Duistermaat 1999:386). The association among
seals and sealings and particular institutions that were able to accumu-
late sealings, and thus information, appears to have intensified.
Archaeologists have traditionally argued that seals and sealings
(along with weights and writing) provided Bronze Age ruling classes
with a means of “administration,” allowing them to produce the records
necessary to extract taxes and quantify surplus (e.g. Childe, 1950;
Gibson and Biggs, 1977, 1991; Wright and Johnson, 1975). While their
appearance in the Neolithic and use in a wide range of different acti-
vities–which has prompted a growing body of research on the religious,
communicative, and memory aspects of seal use (e.g. Ameri et al., 2018;
Costello, 2011; Duistermaat, 2013; Oates, 1996; Peperaki, 2016;
Topçuoglu, 2010)—their role in monitoring the transfer of goods be-
tween different parties in everything from long-distance exchange (e.g.
Algaze 2008) to taxation and redistribution (e.g. Wright and Johnson,
1975) was prominent in many early Near Eastern societies. In the fourth
millennium B.C., there is evidence that as their power grew, early po-
litical institutions increasingly used seals and sealings to engage in such
administration. In Iran, sealings have been recovered that explicitly
depict administrative acts, including motifs that represent the
5
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
movement of goods into storage locations and the counting of animals
(e.g. Dittman, 1986). They potentially helped early rulers ‘see like a
state’ by chopping the world into simplified elements of information
that could be recorded, tracked, and ultimately controlled (e.g. Scott,
1998). Their use by the representatives of inchoate political institutions
may have likewise encouraged people to see themselves as subjects
whose activities left a persistent material record with those institutions.
From the fourth to the third millennium B.C. at Arslantepe, in
Anatolia, a substantial sealing assemblage records the efforts of a
hierarchical and centralized political institution–a palace–to extract
goods from subordinated classes of agro-pastoralists and redistribute
them among different groups of palace laborers (Frangipane, 2007;
Frangipane et al., 2007). Arslantepe’s officials appear to have curated
sealings in dumps located in the storage facility of a palace, which
aggregated and preserved information about payments and disburse-
ments of goods into and from a centralized storage facility (Frangipane
and Pittman, 2007). This accumulation of information was a clear
benefit to the palace, which could use its records to ensure that it
collected goods from all of its subordinates (that is, people who pre-
sumably did not possess their own stores of materialized information).
In this way, Arslantepe’s archive allowed a ruling class to record in-
formation that enabled them to extract goods from their subordinates.
In an administrative system, the means to specify what is owed are
therefore under the control of an administration.
By the third millennium B.C., the cylinder seal came to predominate
the urban assemblages of sites like Uruk (e.g. Boehmer, 1999). The
A.S. Green
Fig. 3. Photograph of a cylinder seal from Mesopotamia (ca. 2600–2500 BC). Adapted from Public Domain Image of an artifact (Accession Number 1984.383.5) held
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was acquired from a private collection in 1984. Scale added by the author based on reported dimensions.
cylinder seal (Fig. 3) emerged against a backdrop of asymmetric control
that may have in fact been challenged by the proliferation of possible
seal uses that accompanied the large scale urbanism that began in the
fourth millennium B.C. and was exemplified in the third millennium
B.C., as the distances across which complex societies interacted in-
creased (e.g. Algaze, 2008; Broodbank, 2013; Petrie, 2013a; Wilkinson,
2014; Wright, 2010). Cylinder seals incorporated a wider range of
complex and elaborate figural representations than have been found on
earlier stamp seals (Nissen, 1977; Porada, 1993). Hans Nissen (1977)
suggested that their shape provided the extra space necessary to convey
unique and complex compositions that reflected the authority of pow-
erful individuals, in contrast to the more standardized motifs that were
likely used by individuals acting on behalf of powerful temple or palace
institutions. Seal motifs may have also represented a range of particular
administrative functions (Pittman, 1994). Using the means of specifi-
cation to depict powerful individuals and institutions helped shore up
the power of an emerging ruling class in a manner that contrasts with
other elite strategies that relied on the strategic ambiguation of value to
mask state weaknesses, such as exaggerating the “wealth-on-the-hoof”
under elite control (e.g. Grossman and Paulette, this issue).
From an analytical perspective, the advent of cylinder seals coin-
cides with significant challenges to studying seal and sealing assem-
blages using comparative and systematic methods. A large proportion
of reported cylinder seals are found in private collections and often lack
specific provenience information, a problem that a number of major
database and digitization projects seek to correct (e.g. Tsouparopoulou,
2014). Moreover, when provenience information that can be analyzed
to reconstruct spatial patterns in seal use is available, it is often limited
6
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
to clay sealings and not the seals themselves. These challenges preclude
direct material comparisons between assemblages at this time. How-
ever, in general, there have been more sealings reported than seals, and
many sealings tend to come from contexts where they may have been
curated, particularly in palaces and temples in particular.
While further study is needed to elucidate these patterns, they un-
derscore the possibility that during the fourth and third millennia B.C.,
exclusionary political institutions in Mesopotamia sought to make seals
harder for most people to acquire, thereby increasing their re-
presentatives’ control over the means to specify and restricting the
overall prevalence of the technology. Mesopotamian sealing assem-
blages record the intensifying efforts of a ruling class based in temples,
palaces, and elite households to extract goods from subordinated classes
(Algaze, 2008; Collon 1993; Frangipane et al., 2007; Matthews, 1999;
Reichel, 2001; Rothman, 2007; Ur, 2010, p. 397; Zettler, 1987), an
important element of a process that Pollock (1999) has described as the
origins of exploitation. Controlling the means of specification was
therefore extremely important to the exclusionary political institutions
of Mesopotamia. Caches of sealings were found in locations that in-
dicate their control by creditor institutions, such as the temples of In-
anna at Uruk (e.g. Boehmer, 1999) and Nippur (e.g. Zettler, 1987). Seal
production, too, appears to have been tightly bound to elite institutions.
Over time, harder and more difficult to work stones were chosen for
seal-making (e.g. Gorelick and Gwinnett, 1990), which constrained
their production. During the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 B.C.), there is
evidence that cylinder seals were often legitimized by including images
of the ruling king, who may have acted on behalf of a deity (e.g. Winter,
1987). It is within this third millennium B.C. milieu that clay tablets
A.S. Green
documenting interest-bearing loans began appearing in southern Me-
sopotamian assemblages (e.g. Hudson and Van de Mieroop, 2002;
Westbrook and Jasnow, 2001). Many of the earliest examples of these
tablets had been directly authenticated with an impression from a seal
user acting on the authority of the early ruling class.
Many narratives of debt and inequality begin with the accounting
evident in these early southern Mesopotamian tablets, which is thought
to represent the first step toward the economic transformations neces-
sary for credit, coinage, and ultimately commercial economies (e.g.
Aglietta, 2018; Goetzmann, 2016; Graeber, 2011). After all, interest-
bearing loans made their appearance during the third millennium B.C.
in Mesopotamia, recorded on clay tablets similar to those that had
originally been impressed with seals and retained by creditors (Hudson
and Van de Mieroop, 2002; Westbrook and Jasnow, 2001). While
sealing and writing traditions diverged over the third millennium (e.g.
Pittman, 2013), they both reflect relations of specification that were
dominated by the centralized institutions of a managerial ruling class.
Many tablets from these early urban contexts carried cylinder seal im-
pressions, which appear to have authenticated them (e.g. Rakic, 2018),
a practice that linked writing to long-established administrative prac-
tices. One of the earliest recorded interest-bearing loans–one that ulti-
mately led to a war between cities–was between two Mesopotamian
city-states, Umma and Lagash, around 2400 B.C. (Van de Mieroop,
2002, p. 62). By this time, the practice of collecting interest on loans
was well-entrenched in Mesopotamian society, and a range of other
interest-bearing loans have also been documented, primarily between
farmers and temples that provided advances of seed and livestock
(Hudson, 2002). By the end of the third millennium B.C., loaning
practices bifurcated into agrarian loans and trade venture loans. The
former were far more odious, relying on interest to create unpayable
obligations that could force debtors to turn over their land and labor to
creditor institutions (Steinkeller, 2002), though Garfinkle (2004) notes
that by the third dynasty of Ur, credit and interest also played an es-
sential role in binding all kinds of households to large institutions.
In curating accounts, the ruling classes of Mesopotamia seized upon
the means of specification, drawing on links with exclusionary political
institutions that had emerged over thousands of years. Even in these
contexts, seals and sealings also supported non-extractive forms of ex-
change. In a world where writing and tablets were relatively new, but
seals and sealings had been used for millennia, the latter appear to have
been a favored medium for a range of different kinds of corporate
groups to brand commodities (e.g. Wengrow, 2008), communicate with
one another (e.g. Oates, 1996), and coordinate long-distance exchange
(e.g. Algaze, 2008). Nevertheless, by the third millennium B.C., it
would appear that the Mesopotamian ruling classes were able to adapt
the means of specification to legitimize the practice of collecting in-
terest. This trajectory was not the determined outcome of technological
change–it was a spillover from a millennia-spanning effort to bind the
means of specification to powerful political institutions directed by the
ruling classes, and use them to develop new ways to extract value from
subordinated classes and accumulate wealth. In Mesopotamia, then,
seal production was closely associated with the political institutions
that empowered the ruling classes, who used a technology that initially
balanced reciprocity to establish extractive reciprocity with sub-
ordinated classes. As a result, their seals tended to be made of hard
stones, carried symbols of ruling institutions, and sealings tended to be
hoarded by institutions and recovered from institutional contexts.
These features of the means of specification were not universal, nor this
trajectory of change inevitable.
4. The means of specification in the Indus civilization
Seals and sealings were also hallmarks of the Urban Phase of the
Indus civilization (c. 2600–1900 B.C.), home to South Asia’s earliest
cities and part of the broader interconnected social world of the third
millennium B.C. (Kenoyer, 1997a; Petrie, 2013b; Possehl, 2002;
7
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
Ratnagar, 2004; Wright, 2010). The Indus civilization emerged across
an extensive area predominately located in India and Pakistan today
(Kenoyer, 1997a; Madella and Fuller, 2006; Petrie, 2013a; Possehl,
2002; Sinopoli, 2015; Wright, 2010). There is a longstanding debate
regarding whether the Indus civilization was stateless, a cohesive po-
lity, a collection of city-states, or an empire (Chakrabarti, 2000;
Kenoyer, 1997a; Petrie, 2013b, 2019; Possehl, 1998; Ratnagar, 1991,
2016; Shinde, 2016; Wright, 2010, 2018). This debate has been, in part,
fueled by neo-evolutionary models that hold that political hierarchies in
general, and a ruling class in particular, are prerequisites for cities and
states (e.g. Flannery, 1972; Service, 1975; Wright, 1977). Evidence
from the Indus civilization does not conform to these models, but there
has been a general reluctance to accept its divergence from neo-evo-
lutionary norms. Fortunately, developments in the comparative ar-
chaeology of complex societies have superseded these models, revealing
that there was a broader and more variable range of political and
economic forms in the past (e.g. Blanton and Fargher, 2008; Feinman
and Carballo, 2018; Jennings, 2016; Jennings and Earle, 2016;
Pauketat, 2007; Wright, 2002; Yoffee, 2005).
In contrast with Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., the
Indus civilization was relatively egalitarian and lacked a ruling class. I
have presented this argument in detail elsewhere (e.g. Green, 2020),
but it is worth reiterating several key points here. Since the mid-
twentieth century, there has been growing recognition that much of
what happens in a complex society–urbanization, long-distance ex-
change, economic specialization and collective action–may or may not
involve the agency of a ruling class (e.g. Fargher et al., 2011; Feinman
and Carballo, 2018; Jennings, 2016; Jennings and Earle, 2016; Oka and
Kusimba, 2008). At the same time, when a ruling class did assert control
over a past society, its members tend to furnish archaeologists with
direct evidence of activities that benefited a few at the expense of the
many: monumental tombs, aggrandizing monuments, and/or large and
restricted temples and palaces (e.g. Pollock, 1999). After a century of
investigation, archaeologists have not found such evidence in Indus
assemblages. As a result, some have argued that exceptional criteria for
inequality are needed in the Indus (e.g. Kenoyer, 2000), or even that the
absence of evidence for a ruling class actually reveals its dominance
(e.g. Miller, 1985).
A far better explanation is that there was no ruling class of man-
agerial elites in the Indus civilization, even if there may have been other
forms of inequality, such as differences in power and status within
households and potential inequalities based on age or gender. It is thus
more theoretically productive to reckon with the likelihood that the
Indus civilization was relatively egalitarian, and grapple with the pos-
sibility that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity.
After all, Indus cities appear to have been politically heterarchical
(sensu Crumley, 1995) and inclusive of numerous and diverse corporate
groups that were unranked with respect to one another. These corpo-
rate groups nonetheless engaged in collective action (sensu Blanton and
Fargher, 2008), producing city street plans, sophisticated technologies,
large and small public structures that tended to have public benefits
(e.g. Green, 2018; Rizvi, 2011; Wright, 2010, 2016, 2018), and spe-
cialized craft goods that were produced and used across and throughout
settlements (Green, 2015; Hoffman and Miller, 2009; Jamison, 2018;
Kenoyer, 1997b; Menon, 2008; Miller, 1999, 2008; Pracchia et al.,
1985; Wright, 1991).
Indus stamp seals were one such craft good (Fig. 4). Like Mesopo-
tamian cylinders, they emerged from a seal tradition that began in the
Neolithic (e.g. Kenoyer and Meadow 2010), incorporating the shapes
and materials of the preceding script-less seals that appeared in the pre-
Urban Phase (ca. 3300–2600 BC). Indus stamp seals, which unlike their
predecessors, featured script and detailed representations of animals
and narrative scenes, were concurrent with the emergence of Indus
cities (ca. 2600–1900 BC). A typical Indus seal of the Urban Phase
consists of a small square stamp with an engraving of an animal and a
line of script on the obverse, and a raised perforated handle on the
A.S. Green
Fig. 4. Photograph of an Indus seal from each side. Reproduced from Green (2015:2). The seal was originally numbered DK 3930 in Mackay (1938) and is numbered
M-225 in the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions, and Accession Number 63.10/43 in the Central Antiquities Collection of the Archaeological Survey of India.
Photograph by the author.
reverse. Examples have been recovered from more than 30 sites
throughout South Asia (Joshi and Parpola, 1987; Parpola et al., 2010;
Shah and Parpola, 1991). Indus seals were part of a range of sophisti-
cated Urban Phase technologies, which also included metallurgy (e.g.
Agrawal, 2009; Hoffman and Miller, 2009), weights (e.g; Miller, 2013;
Ratnagar, 2003), and ornaments made using complex manufacturing
sequences (e.g. Miller, 2008; Vidale, 2000; Vidale and Miller, 2000).
Shared ideas, ideologies, and practices appear to have cross-cut many
different Indus crafts (Wright, 1993). These included technological
virtuosity, the high investment of knowledge and labor in the produc-
tion of portable objects and ornaments (Vidale and Miller, 2000), and a
preference for artificial materials that required a great deal of knowl-
edge and complex production sequences to produce (Miller, 2008;
Wright, 2010). Many different groups of people appear to have pro-
duced Indus craft goods (e.g. Kenoyer, 1992, 1997b; Vidale, 2000),
which nonetheless tended to adhere to standardized sizes, materials,
and forms (e.g. Miller, 2013; Wright, 2010).
The majority of Indus seals measure around 2.5 cm in length and
width, and 1.5 cm in thickness, suggesting a high degree of standar-
dization in shape and size (Franke-Vogt, 1991; Green, 2015;
Konasukawa and Koiso, 2018). They depict a range of images, from
water buffalo or bison to evocative scenes of figures in trees with tigers
on the ground (Fig. 5), and comprise the primary medium of the Indus
script, which has received an enormous amount of scholarly energy
(e.g. Fairservis, 1992; Mahadevan, 1977; Parpola, 1994), but has not
been successfully deciphered (Possehl, 1996). The inclusion of the
script on seals marks a significant break with pre-Urban seal engravings
in South Asia. I see this increase in seal complexity in the emerging
cities of the Indus as a transformation that was analogous to but distinct
from the adoption of cylinders in the first cities of Mesopotamia. The
most common Indus seal engravings depict an animal in profile – bulls,
buffalos, goats, deer, bison, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, in addition
8
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
to the ‘unicorn’ motif. Approximately 75% of the typical stamp seals
that have been recovered depict the unicorn motif (Rissman, 1989, p.
159), which depicts a stylized bovid wearing different kinds of blanket,
collar, and ornament while facing one of the upper corners of the car-
ving field. Assemblages from different sites include differing propor-
tions of seals depicting different animals (Ameri, 2013).
As is the case with many aspects of Indus material culture (e.g.
Petrie et al., 2018), there is evidence that many different corporate
groups were involved in the production of seals (e.g. Franke-Vogt,
1991, 1992; Green, 2015, 2016; Jamison, 2018; Konasukawa and
Koiso, 2018; Rissman, 1989). These groups used a wide range of dif-
ferent techniques, styles, and sequences of action, the distinctions be-
tween some of which are only visible microscopically, to produce ar-
tifacts that were very similar to one another. Despite shared rules for
their production that involved high degrees of skill and knowledge,
technological analysis of seal production (e.g. Green, 2015, 2016;
Jamison, 2013, 2017, 2018) indicates that Indus seals were made by
many different groups of artisans who nonetheless agreed to set of
common standards. The majority of Indus seals were carved from a
particular raw material, steatite, a soft stone that registers less than 1 on
the Mohs scale that was available from specific sources hundreds of
kilometers away from Indus cities (Law, 2006, 2011). Dolomitic stea-
tite, which originates in sources from the highland regions north of the
Indus civilization’s cities, was the favored material for seal production
(Law, 2011). Indus artisans transformed the steatite by heating it to
temperatures exceeding 1200 °C, at which point it hardens and whitens.
This transformative property likely explains steatite’s popularity in
Indus assemblages, a key element of a ‘talc-faience industrial complex’
that produced ornaments for widespread use in Indus cities (Miller,
2008, p. 145). Given that this whitening procedure was almost always
applied to Indus seals after they were carved, it seems reasonable to
infer that it was an essential finishing step, perhaps legitimating Indus
A.S. Green Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232

Fig. 5. Photographs of Indus seals illustrating a range of motifs and inscriptions. A: unicorn (M-143|63.10/23, DK 10323), B: buffalo (M-128|63.10/18, DK 8390), C:
rhinoceros (M-276|63.10/149, DK 4812), D: elephant (M-279|63.10/27, DK 7675), E: short-horned bull (M-251|63.10/44, DK 5791), F: figure in tree with tiger (M-
310|63.10/184, DK 5969), G: seated figure (M-305|63.10/62, DK 3882), H: zebu bull (M-261|63.10/133, DK 8390), I: human/animal composite (K-50|68.1/8). All
of these seals are curated in the Central Antiquities collection of the Archaeological Survey of India, and were photographed by the author.

seals for use and increasing their durability. Though they were made
from stone from restricted sources, they were also relatively easy to
carve, which allowed them to be produced in numbers sufficient for
their widespread use by the many corporate groups who built Indus
cities.
To date, more than 2500 objects identified as seals have been re-
ported from Indus sites (see the three volumes of the Corpus of Indus
Seals and Inscriptions [CISI]), most of which were recovered during
large-scale horizontal excavations in the early twentieth century. The
sheer quantity of seals recovered from Indus cities indicates that they
were widely used by many different corporate groups. Nearly half of
these come from the excavations carried out between 1922 and 1931 at
Mohenjo-daro (Mackay, 1938; Marshall, 1931). These large-scale hor-
izontal excavations divided the site’s higher western and lower, more
extensive, eastern mounds into different excavation ‘areas.’ The areas
on the smaller western mound revealed large-scale non-residential ar-
chitecture, such as the Great Bath and Pillared Hall, which many ar-
chaeologists have argued served a range of public roles (Cork, 2011;
Fentress, 1976; Jansen, 1993; Possehl, 2002; Wright, 2010). The
excavated areas of the eastern mounds revealed numerous residences. It
is from these eastern mounds that the majority of Mohenjo-daro’s seals
were recovered (Franke-Vogt, 1991). Fig. 6 depicts the approximate
spatial distribution of seals in different parts of Mohenjo-daro by in-
terpolating, by area, seal locations from the first two excavation reports
(Mackay, 1938; Marshall, 1931). This visualization does not display
precise find spots, but it does assign seals to the areas where they were
recovered, and clearly indicates just how concentrated they were in
residential areas of the eastern mounds as compared to the parts of the
western mounds given over to large non-residential structures. Seals
were thus a major feature of the day-to-day lives of the city’s urban
population.
But what were Indus seals used for? It is widely argued that the
images carved on Indus seals were emblematic of different social groups
(Fairservis, 1976, 1986; Kenoyer, 2000; Parpola, 1994; Possehl, 2002).
This claim was first made by Walter Fairservis (1976), who argued that
the juxtaposition of repeating images, which presumably had general-
ized meanings, and script, which presumably denoted a specific mes-
sage, suggested that seals materialized a relationship between a seal

9
A.S. Green
Fig. 6. Relative distribution of seals uncovered during the initial excavations seasons at Mohenjo-daro. The density of objects is inferred from the tables published in
Marshall (1931) and Mackay (1938). Note that the majority of the structures uncovered in the eastern mounds have been classified as houses. Data are projected in
WSG 1984 on Google Earth Imagery (accessed 2019) using QGIS 3.8.
user and their social group. While there is limited agreement regarding
what kinds of social groups seal images may have represented, many
scholars have reiterated Fairservis’ position to some degree, offering a
range of different hypotheses. For example, because bison are dis-
proportionately found on Indus seals recovered from Mesopotamian
assemblages, Massimo Vidale (2005, pp. 151–153) has suggested that
they may have been used by Indus communities engaged in multi-
generational long-distance exchange with communities to the west.
This inference supports Steffan Laursen’s (2010, p. 131) argument that
a group of ‘breakaway Harappans’–people from Indus cities–helped
established the second-millennium B.C. state of Dilmun on the island of
Bahrain. Frenez and Vidale (2012, pp. 121–122) have argued that
composite animals may have served as integrative emblems for urban
leaders who somehow bridged multiple social groups. The pre-
ponderance of seals with the unicorn motif suggests that the image may
have been used by many different groups (Kenoyer, 2013, p. 121). The
range of images carved on Indus seals may be smaller than the range of
images carved on Mesopotamian cylinders, which has prompted Frenez
(2018) to argue that Indus seals were more often used to represent
public personas than private persons. However, there have been more
cylinders recovered from a longer period of time in Mesopotamia. At
the same time, Indus seal imagery appears to have been adaptable,
incorporating many local variants of scenes that occur throughout the
Indus civilization’s broader extent (Ameri, 2020).
It is thus reasonable to suggest that the right to use a particular
Indus seal image was shared by multiple individuals. If so, then each
Indus seal image could have been the corporate property of all the
10
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
individuals (seal users?) denoted in the inscriptions associated with that
image. If people shared these images, it is not unreasonable to speculate
that they may also have shared other forms of corporate property. Thus,
a typical Indus seal materialized the connection between a particular
seal user and their corporate group. Wright (2010, p. 327) has argued
that some Indus crafts were produced by communities of artisans who
were ‘guildlike’ in that they did not necessarily share ties of kinship and
were not necessarily organized by the state. The Indus civilization’s
political economy may have been organized by many such corporate
groups, who were represented in Indus seal imagery and who used their
seals to remember exchanges with one another.
The range of sealing forms archaeologists have recovered suggests
that Indus seals were employed in different ways. The earliest known
Indus sealing was placed over a door (e.g. Kenoyer and Meadow, 2010),
materializing information about the circumstances under which a room
was closed. Seals that appear to have been used to close jars, parcels,
and lockers are also well attested in the CISI (Petrie et al., 2018, p. 466).
The ratio of seals to sealings in assemblages from different regions
varies, though recent excavations tend to recover more seals and seal-
ings from smaller areas (Petrie et al., 2018, p. 466). The site of Lothal
was arguably involved in long-distance interaction between Indus
communities and their neighbors in the Arabian Peninsula, and pro-
duced the largest single cache of Indus sealings that has been recovered,
numbering over 90 (Rao, 1973). Unlike sealing assemblages that appear
to have been curated by palace officials in Anatolia (e.g. Frangipane
et al., 2007), the Lothal sealings were highly diverse in form, indicating
that they were used to close different kinds of containers, which in turn
A.S. Green
Fig. 7. Drawing of a clay sealing with multiple seal impressions from the site of
Lothal depicting in the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions (L-211 A 1-3).
suggests they recorded different kinds of transaction (Frenez and Tosi,
2005). The CISI also includes examples of Indus sealings that carry the
impression of multiple seals (Fig. 7), indicating their likely role in fa-
cilitating intensified interaction between multiple corporate groups.
Impressions were also made on loose clay lumps that were not placed
on containers or structures, suggesting the aim was sometimes simply to
reproduce the seal engraving.
These patterns in production and use suggest that Indus seals pro-
vided a wide range of corporate groups with a means of materi-
alizing–or specifying–information about many different kinds of ex-
changes. Their quantity and dispersal within settlements suggest that
they were accessible to the majority of people within the cities, as well
as to at least some communities located in smaller settlements. If we
accept that the seals typically denoted an individual seal user within a
particular corporate group, then sealings may have served as durable
links between seal users and alienable property that could be preserved
or transferred to a different corporate group. Sealings with multiple
impressions suggest it was sometimes necessary to involve multiple
individuals from the same corporate group in a particular transaction.
Because they were made of unfired clay, seal impressions would have
been relatively inexpensive, and because most were small and portable,
they also made it possible to transfer and accumulate information.
These characteristics indicate that Indus seals were used to materialize
information, ensuring its durability, storability, reproducibility and
transferability. They thereby made it possible to precisely ‘remember’
an exchange, suspending it in time until the sealing was broken, and
potentially delaying the completion of an exchange until its
11
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
requirements were payable without odious economic effects. These, I
would argue, are the core functions of the means of specification in
contexts where they balance reciprocity.
5. Comparing the means of specification
Comparing seals and sealings in the Indus and Mesopotamia reveals
that the means of specification transform in connection with increasing
demands for balanced reciprocity in early urban settings. These
common roots are apparent, despite the considerable differences in the
data available from each region. In the Indus, the script is un-deci-
phered and the majority of seals and sealings were recovered from ar-
chaeological excavations and listed in site reports, while in
Mesopotamia, many seals and sealings are found in unprovenienced
collections, but there is also a wide range of deciphered texts. The in-
itial widespread use of seals in both contexts is consistent with ba-
lanced, rather than extractive, reciprocity.
Differences emerged, however, as the urban political economies of
Mesopotamia and the Indus diverged. In both contexts, the demands of
social interaction in complex urban settings prompted changes in the
means of specification. In Mesopotamia, exclusionary political institu-
tions favored a shift to cylinders, while in the Indus, multiple corporate
groups developed standardized but inclusive seal forms that included a
specific range of representative imagery and script. In Mesopotamia,
there were more sealings than seals, seals were made of harder stones,
and interest-bearing tablets ultimately emerged in connection to ad-
ministrative practices. In the Indus, the consistent pattern is one in
which a larger number of seals than sealings has been recovered, seals
were made of softer stone, and they often were recovered from re-
sidential contexts. These patterns suggest that in the Indus, stamp seals
were more widely used by numerous and diverse corporate groups,
predominately in urban contexts, to record many different kinds of
exchange, while in Mesopotamia, sealings were often curated by hier-
archical political institutions–temples and palaces–that used them to
account for payments into and out of centralized surpluses.
In both contexts, the principal role of seals and sealings was to make
information durable, reproducible, transferable, and storable, allowing
different kinds of corporate groups to delay the completion of trans-
actions. This role transcended the specific content of the information
seals and sealings were used to materialize. It makes sense that there
was an intensified need to remember obligations as the world’s first
cities emerged. Jacobs (1961) argued that cities are, at their heart,
concentrations of ‘strangers,’ people with whom you share a settlement
but whose personal information and social background may be un-
known to you. Urbanization increased the number of transactions
people had with strangers. An increasing number of interactions with
strangers was an engine of social complexity (Sherratt, 1995), and the
relationship between the cognitive limits of individuals and the tech-
nological filters for organizing information that potentially expand
those limits explains the upward thresholds of settlement sizes in dif-
ferent periods (Fletcher, 1995). Materializing information about the
corporate group the seal user belonged to may helped Indus commu-
nities learn about and remember the strangers with whom they inter-
acted. By this logic, the foremost role of specification could well have
been to make strangers less strange.
Sharing the means of materializing information and delaying the
completion of exchanges could have made it difficult to disguise ex-
tractive reciprocity, and represents an alternative to other strategies for
maintaining equality, such as resisting the quantification of exchanges
(e.g. Graeber, 2011, p. 79). Given that many or all of the people in-
volved in Indus exchange held the means to specify, information about
transactions was collectivized. Holding information about exchanges in
common may limit the ability of corporate groups to accumulate value
at the expense of one another, and the ability to suspend transactions in
time had the capacity to ensure that the parties to a transaction had
sufficient time to make exchanges fair. Providing all parties to an
A.S. Green
exchange with a record of the transaction can allow participants to
delay its completion until odious inequalities could be avoided. Across
cultures, people have devised many such instruments for recording and
sharing information specifically to balance reciprocity. For example,
Yapese islanders created giant stone disks that recorded the transfer of
valuables, their bulk effectively distributing information about their
value and ownership (e.g. Fitzpatrick and McKeon, 2020), and re-
cordkeeping promotes reciprocity by externalizing memory of an ex-
change (e.g. Basu et al., 2009), especially when that externalized
memory is mutually accessible.
Distributing the means of specification can thus ensure that the
spirit of the gift is readily returned. By contrast, in a typical
Mesopotamian account, information about transactions may have been
asymmetrically controlled by creditor institutions, making it available
for use in extractive political economic strategies. Though
Mesopotamian seals and sealings also emerged in contexts of balanced
reciprocity, the ruling class, through extractive institutions, seized upon
seals and sealings from their earliest days, using information to extract
value from subordinate social groups. It is unclear whether, in the
Indus, the absence of a ruling class prevented this dynamic, or whether
the dispersed production and wide availability of Indus seals within the
cities–a specific configuration of the relations of specification–may in
fact represent an early, perhaps even the first, effort to formalize the
boundary between balanced and negative reciprocity, ensuring fairness
in different kinds of exchange.
The institutionalization of seal use represents a different config-
uration of the relations of specification. Constraining the accumulation
of information exacerbated the potential of the means of specification
to compromise fairness. The means of specification were certainly
prized by creditor institutions, and their control of seals and sealings,
coupled with coercive strategies enabled by enlisting parties outside of
the creditor/debtor social relation, transformed the means to specify
into tools of extractive reciprocity. Such strategies imply power dif-
ferentials between creditor and debtor that required coercive enforce-
ment from parties outside of exchanges, which often emerge as ‘net-
work political strategies’ that exclude some groups from sources of
social power (e.g. Blanton et al., 1996). This form of political activity is
widely believed to have been absent or inconsequential in the Indus
(e.g. Wright, 2016), however it was long established in Mesopotamia.
These differences in political strategy explain why the distribution of
seals and sealings came to favor ‘special function’ contexts at Tepe
Gawra as political hierarchies emerged at the settlement (Rothman
2002). Similarly, asymmetrical control of sealing accounts was an es-
sential administrative strategy at Arslantepe (Frangipane et al., 2007).
The potential for institutionalization to transform the means of
specification may be apparent in the Indus as well. It is telling that the
largest cache of Indus sealings was found in association with a ware-
house at Lothal (e.g. Frenez and Tosi, 2005). The Lothal warehouse
could be considered a special function context analogous to those
identified by Rothman at Tepe Gawra (2002). Collecting and storing
information was presumably as attractive to the collective institutions
of the Indus as it was to those in Mesopotamia. Collective institutions in
the Indus were, however, free of the managerial elites who controlled
their analogues in Mesopotamia. And the accumulation of sealings at
Lothal is exceptional in the Indus, where the overriding pattern con-
sisted of seals–not sealings–found in residential contexts. There is no
evidence to suggest that Indus corporate groups could force the com-
pletion of a transaction, such as through the coercive intervention of a
state official. Perhaps creating the differentials necessary to coerce
payment would have required fundamental changes to the Indus civi-
lization’s political economy–the monopolization of control over mate-
rialized information by a particular network of corporate groups. Such a
monopolization would have required a breakdown of the socio-tech-
nical system that produced and distributed Indus seals among the many
corporate groups who used them. Thus, when widely shared under
relatively egalitarian economic conditions, seals and sealings can
12
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
facilitate the increased frequency of social interactions necessary to
intensify and diversify urban political economies. However, the same
capacities that allow them to balance reciprocity also gave seals and
sealings a guise of fairness, which could be potentially destructive if the
underlying exchanges begin to slide toward extractive reciprocity.
In Mesopotamia, seals and sealings provided coercive institutions
with a means of dressing up extractive debt to look like balanced re-
ciprocity, creating a moral cover that allowed elites to begin collecting
interest. Interest appears to have been associated with the strategic
employment of the means of specification to disguise extractive re-
ciprocity over long periods of time. Interest enhances the ability of
creditors to exert control over future production (e.g. Peebles 2010). It
may result from economic conditions that are difficult to predict, but
there is no economic reason why unpredictability should automatically
disadvantage the debtor (e.g. Graeber, 2011). When value collected
through interest outstrips the value that is produced within the tem-
poral interval of an exchange cycle, debtors must reach into the wealth
they hold to make their payments. In this way, wealth is redistributed
from creditor to debtor without reducing what is actually owed. This
situation is even more likely when exchanges geared toward making the
material world match the social world–the human economy (sensu
Graeber, 2011; Hart, 2011)–give way to a commercial economy geared
toward maximizing the production and circulation of alienable com-
modities. Interest can thereby metastasize, forever growing until it
eventually kills the organism that sustains it. In Mesopotamia (e.g.
Steinkeller, 2002), individuals who were unable to service their debts
were often forced into slavery, a form of “social death.”
A comprehensive examination of the rise of interest-bearing debt is
beyond the scope of this article, and my argument is not that
Mesopotamian cylinders as a technology brought about interest.
Interest instead required the incremental growth of extractive re-
ciprocity over millennia, undertaken by a ruling class that emerged
within Mesopotamian temples and palaces. This trajectory is evident in
the long-term process by which the means of specification became
monopolized by hierarchical political institutions, as evidenced by the
find contexts of seals, hard stones used in seal production, and their
ultimate employment in the service of extraction. The close association
between the means to specify and hierarchical political institutions and
the emphasis on accumulating records within extractive institutions
contributed to the emergence of a ruling class in Mesopotamia, while
the de-centralized production and use of seals and sealings in the Indus
placed similar forms of interest outside of the remit of Indus economic
formations. Seals and sealings may thus have provided an opening for
extractive debt by suspending transactions in time and dressing it up as
balanced reciprocity, but they do not in and of themselves create in-
terest-bearing debts. Exchange cycles cannot occur through one-off
transactions amongst strangers–classical negative reciprocity–but in-
stead through specifying what is owed, suspending the completion of
transactions, and the accrual of interest.
Interest is not the only way to disguise extractive reciprocity, and a
wide range of different kinds of fees, penalties, and tributary obliga-
tions have certainly contributed to crushing debts in the past (e.g.
Baron and Millhauser, 2020). Any obligatory payment has the potential
to become a crushing debt. Those obligatory payments that cross class
boundaries exemplify that potential. This explains certain dynamics of
other forms of obligatory exchange, such as taxes and tribute, both of
which have a long-acknowledged role in reinforcing social inequalities
on the one hand and generating public benefits on the other. Taxes can
aggregate wealth within a societal collective, which can result in widely
disseminated public benefits. They can be extractive, transferring
wealth to a ruling class embedded within a state, but need not be,
especially if they redistribute wealth from non-ruling groups of elites
into the non-elite classes. This is why there is such a long discourse in
anthropology about redistribution and its role in reciprocity. Rents,
regular payments to landowning corporate groups, have strong ex-
tractive potential, which can explain a the emergence of a great range
A.S. Green
of inequalities through time, such as the wealth disparities that
emerged between land-owning and tenant farming homesteads in 18th
Century Iceland (e.g. Bolender et al., 2020). Where taxes rely on a re-
latively permanent social relation between taxpayer and state, rents
require a permanent social relation between tenant and the owner of
the land they occupy. The potential for extractive reciprocity in
agrarian contexts may partially explain why inequality can be high in
contexts where land is limited (e.g. Bogaard et al., 2019). Like taxes and
rent, interest can become extractive when it crosses class boundaries
and outstrips the value generated over a particular period of time. This
is why agrarian loans in early Mesopotamia were often more egregious
than venture loans–they subordinated a class of farmers, while venture
loans bound together and equalized wealth between corporate groups
within the same class.
6. Conclusion
To summarize, my argument is that the means of specification can
generate permanent economic inequalities, but they can also sustain
balanced reciprocity. Interest, which is predicated on quantification,
must be incorporated into the means of specification to bring about
extractive reciprocity, which is maintained through violence. In
Mesopotamia, extractive reciprocity was associated with the long-term
monopolization–and perhaps institutionalization–of seals by a ruling
class. In the Indus, seals were put to a wide variety of uses by many
different groups. In both contexts, seals and sealings appear to have
been an essential technology for social interaction in emerging complex
urban settings, presumably providing people with a means of re-
membering obligations and delaying the completion of transactions.
The means of specification contribute to the formation permanent in-
equalities only when they allow creditors to pursue extraction, such as
through the enforced collection of interest–value above and beyond
whatever was invested in a particular exchange. Such debts can occur
when the means of specification are monopolized by creditors, who
materialize information in order to dress up extractive reciprocity up in
the guise of balanced reciprocity, which can mobilize the state itself to
coerce payment from debtors. Only then can extractive reciprocities
take root.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This article was inspired by the work of the anthropologist and
activist David Graeber, who passed away while it was in press. His
research exemplifies the potential of anthropology to contribute to and
shape society, and I dedicate this work to him. I am grateful to Joanne
Baron and John Millhauser for cultivating the discussions that helped
me develop this argument. They organized an insighful session on the
archaeology of money, debt and finance at the 2018 meeting of the
Society for American Archaeology, which led to this special issue. They
created and organized an ideal space for developing ideas about debt
and balanced reciprocity that initially struck me while completing my
PhD dissertation, and their editorial suggestions were helpful and
constructive. I am also grateful to the Archaeological Survey of India for
permitting and facilitating the research that led to this article, and to
Ravindra Nath Singh and Vasant Shinde, with whom I have enjoyed
fruitful collaborations in the field. I am indebted to Darryl Wilkinson,
Toby Wilkinson, and Nancy Highcock for their feedback on the manu-
script, and to Cameron Petrie for his comments and support. I would
also like to specify my obligations to Thomas Leppard, Rita Wright, and
13
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
Sneh Patel, with whom I have had long-running discussions that I drew
upon in assembling this argument. In addition to the anonymous re-
viewers, Kathryn Grossman and Tate Paulette provided valuable sug-
gestions that helped me improve the manuscript. The research that led
to this article was funded by the Fulbright Program, and I was able to
write it up while working on the TwoRains project, which was funded
by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation program, grant agreement no. 648609
and the Global Challenges Research Fund’s TIGR2ESS (Transforming
India’s Green Revolution by Research and Empowerment for
Sustainable food Supplies) Project, Biotechnology and Biological
Sciences Research Council grant number BB/P027970/1. These projects
gave me invaluable opportunities to work with Aftab Alam, Jennifer
Bates, Emma Lightfoot, Cemre Ustunkaya, Nathan Wright, Joanna
Walker, Danika Parikh, Akshyeta Suryanarayan, Andreas Angourakis,
Arnau Garcia-Molsosa, Hector Orengo, Alessandro Ceccarelli, and
Francesc Conesa, all of whom have been an inexhaustible source of
conversation about South Asia’s past. The manuscript was partially
prepared in the library of King's College, Cambridge. This work was
made possible thanks to the ongoing support of Lillian, Henry and Isaac
Green. Any faults in the text or argument are my own.
References
Aglietta, M., 2018. Money: 5000 Years of Debt and Power. Verso, London.
Agrawal, D.P. (Ed.), 2009. Harappan Technology and its Legacy, Rupa and Infinity
Foundation Series. Rupa & Co. in association with Infinity Foundation, New Delhi.
Akkermans, P.M.M.G., Duistermaat, K., 1996. Of storage and nomads. The sealings from
Late Neolithic, Sabi Abyad, Syria. Paleo 22, 17–44. https://doi.org/10.3406/paleo.
1996.4635.
Algaze, G., 2008. Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an
Urban Landscape. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Algaze, G., 1993. Expansionary dynamics of some early pristine states. American
Anthropologist 95, 304–333.
Alizadeh, A., 1988. Socio-Economic Complexity in Southwestern Iran during the Fifth and
Fourth Millennia B.C.: The Evidence from Tell-i Bakun A. Iran 26, 17–34.
Ameri, M., 2020. Variations on a theme: Iconographic variability in the horned anthro-
pomorphic figures of the Indus civilization. Artibus Asiae LXXIX 29–50.
Ameri, M., 2013. Regional diversity in the Harappan World: the evidence of the seals. In:
Abraham, S.A., Gullapalli, P., Raczek, T.P., Rizvi, U.Z. (Eds.), Connections and
Complexity. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, pp. 355–374.
Ameri, M., Costello, S.K., Jamison, G., Scott, S.J. (Eds.), 2018. Seals and Sealing in the
Ancient World: Case Studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, and South Asia,
first ed. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108160186.
Appadurai, A. (Ed.), 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Baron, J.P., 2018. Making money in Mesoamerica: Currency production and procurement
in the Classic Maya financial system: Making Money in Mesoamerica. Econ.
Anthropol. 5, 210–223. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12118.
Baron, J.P., Millhauser, J.K., 2020. Introduction: a place for archaeology in the study of
money, finance, and debt. J. Anthropol. Archaeol (forthcoming).
Basu, S., Dickhaut, J., Hecht, G., Towry, K., Waymire, G., 2009. Recordkeeping alters
economic history by promoting reciprocity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106, 1009–1014.
Blanton, R.E., Fargher, L.F., 2008. Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern
States. Springer Science and Business Media, New York.
Blanton, R.E., Feinman, G.M., Kowalewski, S.A., Peregrine, P.N., 1996. A dual-processual
theory for the evolution of mesoamerican civilization. Curr. Anthropol. 37, 1–14.
https://doi.org/10.1086/204471.
Boehmer, R.M., 1999. Uruk: Fr¸Heste Siegelabrollungen. Deutsches Archëologisches
Institut, Orient-Abteilung., Mainz am Rhein, Philipp von Zabern.
Bogaard, A., Fochesato, M., Bowles, S., 2019. The farming-inequality nexus: New insights
from ancient Western Eurasia. Antiquity 1–15. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.
105.
Bolender, D., Johnson, E., Bello, G., 2020. Tenancy, finance, and access to commercial
goods: Interpreting impoverished assemblages in Skagafjörður, Iceland, CE
1300–1900. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 60, 101227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.
101227.
Bourdieu, P., 1972. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.
Broodbank, C., 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea, A History of the Mediterranean from
the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. Thames & Hudson, London.
Chakrabarti, D.K., 2000. Mahajanapada States of Early Historic India. In: Hansen, M.H.
(Ed.), A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures. Royal Danish Academy of
Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen, pp. 375–392.
Childe, V.G., 1950. The urban revolution. Town Plann. Rev. 21, 3–17.
Collon, D., 1993. First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East, Rev. ed.
British Museum Press, London.
Cork, E., 2011. Rethinking the Indus: A Comparative Re-evaluation of the Indus
Civilisation as an Alternative Paradigm in the Organisation and Structure of Early
A.S. Green
Complex Societies. Archaeopress, Oxford.
Costello, S.K., 2011. Image, Memory and ritual: Re-viewing the antecedents of writing.
Cambridge Archaeol. J. 21, 247–262. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0959774311000266.
Costin, C.L., 1991. Craft specialization: Issues in defining, documenting, and explaining
the organization of production. Archaeol. Method Theory 3, 1–56.
Crumley, C.L., 1995. Heterarchy and the analysis of complex societies. Archeol. Pap. Am.
Anthropol. Assoc. 6, 1–5.
D’Altroy, T., Earle, T.K., 1985. Stale finance, wealth finance and storage in the inka po-
litical economy. Curr. Anthropol. 26, 187–206.
Dietler, M., Hayden, B. (Eds.), 2010. Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic
Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power. University of Alabama Press,
Tuscaloosa, AL.
Dittman, R., 1986. Seals, sealings and tablets: Thoughts on the changing pattern of ad-
ministrative control from the Late-Uruk to the Proto-Elamite Period at Susa. In:
Finkbeiner, U. (Ed.), Gamdat Nasr: Period or Regional Style? Ludwig Reichert Verlag,
Weisbaden, Dr, pp. 333–353.
Duistermaat, K., 2013. Private Matters: The emergence of sealing practices in Neolithic
Syria. In: Nieuwenhuyse, O.P., Bernbeck, R., Rogasch, J., Akkermans, P.M.M.G.
(Eds.), Interpreting the Late Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia. Brepol Publishers,
Turnhout, Belgium, pp. 315–322.
Duistermaat, K., 2012. Which came first, the bureaucrat or the seal? Some thoughts on the
non-administrative origins of seals in Neolithic Syria. In: Regulski, I., Duistermaat, K.,
Verkinderen, P. (Eds.), Seals and Sealing Practices in the Near East: Developments in
Administration and Magic from Prehistory to the Islamic Period. Uitgeverij Peeters En
Departement Oosterse Studies, Leuven, pp. 1–16.
Duistermaat, K., 1996. The seals and sealings. In: Akkermans, P.M.M.G. (Ed.), Tell Sabi
Abyad, the Late Neolithic Settlement: Report on the Excavations of the University of
Amsterdam (1988) and the National Museum of Antiquities Leiden (1991–1993) in
Syria. Nederlands Historich-Archaeologisch Instituut Te Instanbul, Leiden, pp.
339–402.
Earle, T.K., 1982. Prehistoric economics and the archaeology of exchange. In: Ericson,
J.E., Earle, T.K. (Eds.), Contexts for Prehistoric Exchange. Academic Press, New York,
pp. 1–12.
Earle, T.K., Ericson, J.E. (Eds.), 1977. Exchange Systems in Prehistory. Academic Press,
New York.
Fairservis, W.A., 1992. The Harappan Civilization and Its Writing: A Model for the
Decipherment of the Indus Script. E.J. Brill, New York.
Fairservis, W.A., 1986. Cattle and the Harappan Chiefdoms of the Indus Valley.
Expedition 28, 43–50.
Fairservis, W.A., 1976. Excavations at Allahdino: Seals and Inscribed Material. Papers of
the Allahdino Expedition, New York.
Fargher, L.F., Blanton, R.E., Espinoza, V.Y.H., Millhauser, J., Xiuhtecutli, N., Overholtzer,
L., 2011. Tlaxcallan: the archaeology of an ancient republic in the New World.
Antiquity 85, 172–186. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X0006751X.
Feinman, G.M., Carballo, D.M., 2018. Collaborative and competitive strategies in the
variability and resiliency of large-scale societies in Mesoamerica. Econ. Anthropol. 5,
7–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12098.
Feinman, G.M., Garraty, C.P., 2010. Preindustrial markets and marketing: Archaeological
perspectives. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 39, 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.
anthro.012809.105118.
Fentress, M.A., 1976. Resource access, exchange systems and regional interaction in the
Indus valley. PhD Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Department of
Anthropology, Philadelphia.
Ferioli, P., Fiandra, E., 1983. Clay Sealings from Arslantepe. In: Ferioli, P. (Ed.), Origini:
Preistoria e Protostoria Delle Civiltà Antiche. Università delgi Studi di Roma, Rome,
pp. 455–509.
Fitzpatrick, S.M., McKeon, S., 2020. Banking on stone money: ancient antecedents to
bitcoin. Econ. Anthropol. 7, 7–21. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12154.
Flannery, K.V., 1972. The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 3,
399–426.
Fletcher, R., 1995. The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Frangipane, M., 2007. The Development of an early state system without urbanisation. In:
Frangipane, M. (Ed.), Arslantepe cretulae: an early centralised administrative system
before writing, Arslantepe. Università di Roma “La Sapienza” Dipartimento di
Scienze Storiche Archeologiche e Anthropologiche dell’Antichità, Roma, pp.
469–477.
Frangipane, M., Ferioli, P., Blackman, M.J. (Eds.), 2007. Università di Roma “La
Sapienza”. Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche Archeologiche e Antropologiche
dell’Antichità, Rome.
Frangipane, M., Pittman, H., 2007. The Fourth Millennium Glyptics at Arslantepe. In:
Frangipane, M. (Ed.), Arslantepe cretulae: an early centralised administrative system
before writing, Arslantepe. Università di Roma “La Sapienza” Dipartimento di
Scienze Storiche Archeologiche e Anthropologiche dell’Antichità, Rome, pp.
175–354.
Franke-Vogt, U., 1992. Inscribed objects from Mohenjodaro: Some remarks on stylistic
variability and distribution patterns. In: South Asian Archaeology 1989; Papers from
the Tenth International Conference of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe.
Prehistory Press, Madison, pp. 103–112.
Franke-Vogt, U., 1991. Die Glyptik aus Mohenjo-Daro. von Zabern, Mainz am Rhein.
Frenez, D., 2018. Private Person or Public Persona? Use and Significance of Standard
Indus Seals as Markers of Formal Socio-Economic Identities. In: Frenez, D., Jamison,
G.M., Law, R., Vidale, M., Meadow, R.H. (Eds.), Walking with the Unicorn: Social
Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp.
161–188.
14
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
Frenez, D., Tosi, M., 2005. The Lothal Sealings: Records from an Indus Civilization town
at the Eastern End of the maritime trade circuits across the Arabian Sea. In: Perna, M.
(Ed.), Studi in Onore Di Enrica Fiandra: Contributi Di Archaeologia Egea e
Vicinorientale. De Boccard, Paris, pp. 65–103.
Frenez, D., Vidale, M., 2012. Harappan Chimaeras as ‘Symbolic Hypertexts’. Some
Thoughts on Plato, Chimaera and the Indus Civilization. South Asian Stud. 28,
107–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2012.725578.
Garfinkle, S., 2004. Shepherds, merchants, and credit: some observations on lending
practices in Ur III Mesopotamia. J. Econ. Soc. Hist. Orient 47, 1–30. https://doi.org/
10.1163/156852004323069385.
Gibson, M., Biggs, R.D., 1991. The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the
Ancient Near East. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization. The Oriental Institute of
the University of Chicago, Chicago.
Gibson, M., Biggs, R.D. (Eds.), 1977. Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near East. Undena
Publications, Malibu, CA.
Goetzmann, W.N., 2016. Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization
Possible. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Goodenough, W.H., 1978. Property, Kin, and Community on Truk, secod ed. Archon
Books, Hamden, CT.
Gorelick, L., Gwinnett, A.J., 1990. The ancient cylinder seal as social emblem and status
symbol. J. Near Eastern Stud. 49, 49–56.
Graeber, D., 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House Publishing, New York.
Graeber, D., 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our
Own Dreams. Palgrave, New York.
Green, A.S., 2020. Killing the priest-king: Addressing egalitarianism in the Indus civili-
zation. J. Archaeol. Res. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09147-9.
Green, A.S., 2018. Mohenjo-Daro’s Small Public Structures: Heterarchy, Collective Action
and a Re-visitation of Old Interpretations with GIS and 3D Modelling. Cambridge
Archaeol. J. 28, 205–223. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774317000774.
Green, A.S., 2016. Finding Harappan Seal carvers: An Operational Sequence Approach to
Identifying People in the Past. J. Archaeol. Sci. 72, 128–141.
Green, A.S., 2015. Stamp Seals in the Political Economy of South Asia’s Earliest Cities.
PhD Dissertation. New York University, Department of Anthropology, New York.
Gregory, C.A., 1982. Gifts and Commodities. HAU Books, Chicago, IL.
Grossman, K., Paulette, T., 2020. Wealth-on-the-hoof and the low-power state: Caprines
as capital in early Mesopotamia. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 60, 101207. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101207.
Gudeman, S.F., 2001. The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture.
Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Guyer, J.I., 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hann, C.M., Hart, K., 2011. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique.
Polity Press, Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA.
Hart, K. (Ed.), 2011. The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide, Reprinted. Polity,
Cambridge (2011).
Hart, K., 2001. Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart and His Memory Bank. W. W.
Norton & Company, New York.
Harvey, D., 1982. The Limits to Capital. Verso, London.
Hirth, K.G., 2013. The Merchant’s World: Commercial Diversity and the Economics of
Interregional Exchange in Highland Mesoamerica. In: Hirth, K.G., Pillsbury, J. (Eds.),
Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World. Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C., pp. 85–112.
Hoffman, B.C., Miller, H.M.-L., 2009. Production and consumption of copper-base metals
in the Indus civilization. J. World Prehist. 22, 237–264. https://doi.org/10.1007/
s10963-009-9024-4.
Hudson, M., 2002. Reconstructing the origins of interest-bearing debt and the logic of
clean slates. In: Hudson, M., Van de Mieroop, M. (Eds.), Debt and Economic Renewal
in the Ancient Near East. CDL Press, Bethesda, MD, pp. 7–58.
Hudson, M., Van de Mieroop, M. (Eds.), 2002. Debt and economic renewal in the ancient
Near East. CDL Press, Bethesda, MD.
Jacobs, J., 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, New York.
Jamison, G.M., 2013. Experimental and ethnoarchaeological approaches to indus seal
production: modeling variation in manufacturing techniques. Heritage J. Multidiscip.
Stud. Archaeol. 222–243.
Jamison, G.M., 2017. The Organization of Indus Unicorn Seal Production: A Diachronic
Comparative Study of Style, Skill, and Sociopolitical Organization (PhD Thesis).
University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Jamison, G.M., 2018. The organization of Indus unicorn seal production. A multi-faceted
investigation of technology, skill, and style. In: Frenez, D., Jamison, G.M., Law, R.,
Vidale, M., Meadow, R.H. (Eds.), Walking with the Unicorn: Social Organization and
Material Culture in Ancient South Asia. Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 269–288.
Jansen, M., 1993. Mohenjo-Daro: Water Splendour 4500 Years Ago. Frontinus-
Gesellschaft, Bergisch.
Jennings, J., 2016. Killing Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and Its
Consequences. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Jennings, J., Earle, T.K., 2016. Urbanization, state formation, and cooperation: A re-
appraisal. Curr. Anthropol. 57, 474–493.
Joshi, J.P., Parpola, A., 1987. Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions. 1: Collections in
India. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Ser. B. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia,
Helsinki.
Kenoyer, J.M., 2013. Iconography of the Indus Unicorn: Origins and Legacy. In: Abraham,
S.A., Gullapalli, P., Raczek, T.P., Rizvi, U.Z. (Eds.), Connections and Complexity: New
Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, pp.
107–126.
Kenoyer, J.M., 2000. Wealth and socioeconomic hierarchies of the Indus Valley civili-
zation. In: Richards, J., Van Buren, M. (Eds.), Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in
A.S. Green
Ancient States. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 88–109.
Kenoyer, J.M., 1997a. Early City-States in South Asia: Comparing the Harappan Phase
and the Early Historic Period. In: Nichols, D.L., Charlton, T.H. (Eds.), The
Archaeology of City-States: Cross-Cultural Approaches. Smithsonian Institution Press,
Washington, D.C., pp. 51–70.
Kenoyer, J.M., 1997b. Trade and technology of the Indus Valley: New Insights from
Harappa, Pakistan. World Archaeol. 29, 262–280.
Kenoyer, J.M., 1992. Harappan Craft Specialization and the Question of urban segrega-
tion and stratification. East. Anthropol. 45, 39–54.
Kenoyer, J.M., Meadow, R.H., 2008. The Early Indus Script at Harappa: Origins and
Development. In: Olijdam, E., Spoor, R.H. (Eds.), Intercultural Relations between
South and Southwest Asia, Studies in Commemoration of E.C.L. During Caspers
(1934–1996). Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 124–131.
Kenoyer, M., Meadow, R.H., 2010. Inscribed objects from Harappa excavations
1986–2007. In: Parpola, A., Pande, B.M., Koskikallio, P. (Eds.), Corpus of Indus Seals
and Inscriptions 3: New Material Untraced Objects and Collections Outside India and
Pakistan Part 1: Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Soumalainen Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki
pp. xliv–lviii.
Konasukawa, A., Koiso, M., 2018. The size of Indus seals and its significance. In: Frenez,
D., Jamison, G.M., Law, R., Vidale, M., Meadow, R.H. (Eds.), Walking with the
Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia.
Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 289–314.
Laursen, S.T., 2010. The westward transmission of Indus Valley sealing technology:
Origin and development of the “Gulf Type” seal and other administrative technolo-
gies in Early Dilmun, c. 2100–200. Arab. Archaeol. Epigr. 21, 96–134.
Law, R., 2011. Inter-Regional Interaction and Urbanism in the Ancient Indus Valley: A
Geological Provenience Study of Harappa’s Rock and Mineral Assemblage. Linguistics
Archaeology and the Human Past, Occasional Paper. Research Institute for Humanity
and Nature, Kyoto.
Law, R., 2006. Moving Mountains: The Trade and Transport of Rocks and Minerals within
the Greater Indus Valley Region. In: Robertson, E.C., Seibert, J.D., Fernandez, D.C.,
Zender, M.U. (Eds.), Space and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology. University of Calgary
Press, Calgary, pp. 301–314.
Lévi-Strauss, C., 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Rev. ed. Beacon Press,
Boston.
Mackay, E., 1938. Further Excavations at Mohenjo-Daro, Being an Official Account of
Archaeological Excavations at Mohenjo-Daro Carried Out by the Government of India
Between the Years 1927 and 1931. Manager of Publications, Delhi.
Madella, M., Fuller, D.Q., 2006. Palaeoecology and the Harappan Civilisation of South
Asia: a reconsideration. Quat. Sci. Rev. 25, 1283–1301. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
quascirev.2005.10.012.
Mahadevan, I., 1977. The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance, and Tables. Archaeological
Survey of India, New Delhi.
Malinowski, B., 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise
and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Studies in Economics
and Political Science, Routledge, London.
Marshall, J. (Ed.), 1931. Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization. Arthur Prosbain,
London.
Matthews, D.M., 1999. The Early Glyptic of Tell Brak: Cylinder Seals of Third Millennium
Syria. J. Am. Orient. Soc. 119, 525. https://doi.org/10.2307/605969.
Marx, K., 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vintage Books, New York.
Mauss, M., 1925. The Gift, expanded edition. HAU Books, Chicago, IL.
McIntosh, R., 2005. Ancient Middle Niger. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
McMahon, A., 2009. The lion, the king and the cage: Late Chalcolithic iconography and
ideology in northern Mesopotamia. Iraq 71, 115–124. https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0021088900000772.
Menon, J., 2008. Archaeological problems with specialization. Stud. Hist. 24, 137–157.
https://doi.org/10.1177/025764300702400105.
Miller, D., 1985. Ideology and the Harappan civilization. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 4,
34–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-4165(85)90013-3.
Miller, H.M.-L., 2013. Weighty Matters: Evidence for Unity and Regional Diversity from
the Indus Civilization Weights. In: Abraham, S.A., Gullapalli, P., Raczek, T.P., Rizvi,
U.Z. (Eds.), Connections and Complexity. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA, pp.
161–176.
Miller, H.M.-L., 2008. The Indus talc-faience complex. In: Raven, E.M. (Ed.), South Asian
Archaeology 1999. Egbert Forsten, Groningen, pp. 111–132.
Miller, H.M.-L., 1999. Pyrotechnology and Society in the Cities of the Indus Valley. PhD
Dissertation. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Anthropology,
Madison, WI.
Millhauser, J.K., 2017. Debt as a double-edged risk: A historical case from Nahua (Aztec)
Mexico: Debt as a Double-Edged Risk. Econ. Anthropol. 4, 263–275. https://doi.org/
10.1002/sea2.12093.
Nissen, H.J., 1977. Aspects of the development of early cylinder seals. In: Gibson, M.,
Biggs, R.D. (Eds.), Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East, 6. Undena Publications,
Malibu, pp. 15–24.
Oates, J., 1996. A prehistoric communication revolution. Cambridge Archaeol. J. 6,
165–176. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774300001669.
Oka, R., Kusimba, C.M., 2008. The archaeology of trading systems, Part 1: Towards a new
trade synthesis. J. Archaeol. Res. 16, 339–395. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-008-
9023-5.
Peperaki, O., 2016. The value of sharing: Seal use, food politics, and the negotiation of
labor in Early Bronze II Mainland Greece. Am. J. Archaeol. 120, 3–25. https://doi.
org/10.3764/aja.120.1.0003.
Parpola, A., 1994. Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Parpola, A., Pande, B.M., Koskikallio, P., 2010. Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions:
Volume 3: New material, untraced objects and collections outside India and Pakistan.
15
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki.
Parry, J.P., Bloch, M. (Eds.), 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Pauketat, T.R., 2007. Chiefdoms and other archaeological delusions, Issues in Eastern
Woodlands archaeology. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD.
Peebles, G., 2010. The anthropology of credit and debt. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 39,
225–240. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-090109-133856.
Petrie, C.A., 2019. Diversity, variability, adaptation and “fragility” in the Indus
Civilization. In: Yoffee, N. (Ed.), The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms,
McDonald Institute Conversations. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
Cambridge, pp. 109–133.
Petrie, C.A. (Ed.), 2013. Ancient Iran and its Neighbours: Local Developments and Long-
range Interactions in the Fourth Millennium BC. Oxbow Books, Oxford.
Petrie, C.A., 2013b. South Asia. In: Clark, P. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cities in
World History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 83–104. https://doi.org/10.
1093/oxfordhb/9780199589531.013.0005.
Petrie, C.A., Parikh, D., Green, A.S., Bates, J., 2018. Looking beneath the veneer.
Thoughts about environmental and cultural diversity in the Indus Civilization. In:
Frenez, D., Jamison, G.M., Law, R., Vidale, M., Meadow, R.H. (Eds.), Walking with
the Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia.
Archaeopress, Oxford, pp. 453–474.
Piketty, T., 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Pittman, H., 2013. Seals and Sealings in the Sumerian World. In: Crawford, H. (Ed.), The
Sumerian World. Routledge, London, pp. 319–344.
Pittman, H., 1995. Cylinder Seals and Scarabs in the Ancient Near East. In: Baines, J.,
Beckman, G., Rubinson, K. (Eds.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. Hendrickson
Publishers, Peabody, MA, pp. 1589–1604.
Pittman, H., 1994. Towards an Understanding of the Role of Glyptic Imagery in the
Administrative Systems of Proto-Literate Greater Mesopotamia. In: Ferioli, P., Fissori,
G.G., Frangipane, M. (Eds.), Archives Before Writing. Ministero per I beni culturali e
ambientali, Turin, pp. 177–203.
Polanyi, K., 1957. The economy as instituted process. In: Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C.M.,
Pearson, H.W. (Eds.), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History
and Theory. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL, pp. 243–269.
Polanyi, K., 1944. The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our
time, second Beacon Paperback ed. Beacon Press, Boston.
Pollock, S., 1999. Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that never was. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Porada, E., 1993. Why Cylinder Seals? Engraved Cylindrical Seal Stones of the Ancient
Near East, Fourth to First Millennium B.C. Art Bull. 75, 563–582.
Possehl, G.L., 2002. The Indus Civilization: A contemporary perspective. AltaMira Press,
Walnut Creek, CA.
Possehl, G.L., 1998. Sociocultural complexity without the state: the Indus civilization. In:
Feinman, G.M., Marcus, J. (Eds.), Archaic States. School of American Research Press,
Santa Fe, NM, pp. 261–292.
Possehl, G.L., 1996. The Indus Age. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, The
writing system.
Pracchia, S., Tosi, M., Vidale, M., 1985. Craft industries at Moenjo-daro. In: South Asian
Archaeology 1983. Instituto Universitario Orientale Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici,
Naples, pp. 207–247.
Rakic, Y.Z., 2018. Sealing practices in the Akkadian period. In: Ameri, M., Costello, S.K.,
Jamison, G., Scott, S.J. (Eds.), Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, pp. 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108160186.
008.
Rao, S.R., 1973. Lothal and the Indus Civilization. G. G. Pathare at Popular Press,
Bombay.
Ratnagar, S., 2004. Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze
Age. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Ratnagar, S.F., 2016. Harappan Archaeology: Early State Perspectives. Primus Books,
Delhi.
Ratnagar, S.F., 2003. Theorizing Bronze-Age intercultural trade: The evidence of the
weights. Paléorient 29, 29–92.
Ratnagar, S.F., 1991. Enquiries into the Political Organization of Harappan Society.
Ravish Publishers, Pune, India.
Reichel, C.D., 2001. Seals and Sealings at Tell Asmar: A New Look at Ur III to Early Old
Babylonian Palace. In: Hallo, W.W., Winter, I.J. (Eds.), Seals and Seal Impressions.
CDL Press, Bethesda, MD, pp. 101–131.
Rissman, P., 1989. The Organization of Stamp Seal Production in the Harappan
Civilization. In: In: Kenoyer, J.M. (Ed.), Old Problems – New Perspectives in the
Archaeology of South Asia 2. Wisconsin Archaeological Reports, Madison, pp.
159–180.
Rizvi, U.Z., 2011. Subjectivity and Spatiality in Indus Urban Forms: Mohenjo-Daro, the
Body, and the Domestication of Waste. In: Johansen, P.G., Bauer, A.M. (Eds.), The
Archaeology of Politics the Materiality of Political Practice and Action in the Past.
Newcastle, UK, pp. 221–244.
Rothman, M.S., 2007. The archaeology of early administrative systems in Mesopotamia.
In: Stone, E.C. (Ed.), Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick
Adams. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, Los Angeles, CA, pp. 235–254. https://
doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvdjrqjp.
Rothman, M.S., 2002. Tepe Gawra: The Evolution of a Small, Prehistoric Center in
Northern Iraq. University Museum Monograph. University of Pennsylvania, Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia.
Sahlins, M.D., 1972. Stone Age Economics. Aldine-Atherton, Chicago.
Schmandt-Besserat, D., 1996. How Writing Came About, first abridged ed. University of
Texas Press, Austin.
A.S. Green
Schmandt-Besserat, D., 1990. Accounting in the prehistoric Middle East. Archeomaterials
4, 15–23.
Scott, J.C., 1998. Seeing Like a State. Running Feet Books, Durham, NC.
Service, E.R., 1975. Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural
Evolution. W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Shah, S.G.M., Parpola, A., 1991. Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions. 2: Collections in
Pakistan. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae Ser. B. Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki.
Sherratt, A., 1995. Reviving the grand narrative: Archaeology and long-term change the
second David L. Clarke memorial lecture. J. Eur. Archaeol. 3, 1–32. https://doi.org/
10.1179/096576695800688223.
Shinde, V.S., 2016. Current Perspectives on the Harappan Civilization. In: Schug, G.R.,
Walimbe, S.R. (Eds.), A Companion to South Asia in the Past. Malden, Oxford, pp.
127–144.
Simmel, G., 1978. The Philosophy of Money. Routledge, New York.
Sinopoli, C.M., 2015. Ancient South Asian cities in their regions. In: Yoffee, N. (Ed.), The
Cambridge World History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 319–342.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139035606.020.
Steinkeller, P., 2002. Money-lending practices in Ur III Babylonia: The issue of economic
motivation. In: Hudson, M., Van de Mieroop, M. (Eds.), Debt and Economic Renewal
in the Ancient Near East. CDL Press, Bethesda, MD, pp. 109–138.
Strathern, M., 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with
society in Melanesia. In: Nachdr (Ed.), Studies in Melanesian anthropology.
University of California Press, Berkeley.
Topçuoglu, O., 2010. Iconography of protoliterate seals. In: Woods, C., Emberling, G.,
Teeter, E., University of Chicago (Eds.), Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in
the Ancient Middle East and Beyond, Oriental Institute Museum Publications.
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill, pp. 29–32.
Trigger, B.G., 2003. Understanding Early Civilizations. A Comparative Study. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Tsouparopoulou, C., 2014. Progress report: An online edatabase for the documention of
seals, sealings, and seal impressions in the ancient Near East. Studia Orientalia
Electron. 2, 37–68.
Ur, J.A., 2010. Cycles of Civilization in Northern Mesopotamia, 4400–2000 BC. J.
Archaeol. Res. 18, 387–431. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-010-9041-y.
Van de Mieroop, M., 2002. A history of Near Eastern debt? In: Hudson, M., Van de
Mieroop, M. (Eds.), Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East. CDL Press,
Bethesda, MD, pp. 59–94.
Vidale, M., 2005. The Short-Horned Bull on the Indus Seals: A Symbol of the Families in
the Western Trade? 147–157.
Vidale, M., 2000. The archaeology of Indus crafts: Indus craftspeople and why we study
them. IsIAO.
Vidale, M., Miller, H.M.-L., 2000. On the development of Indus technical virtuosity and its
relation to social structure. In: Taddei, M., De Marco, G. (Eds.), South Asian
Archaeology 1997. Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, Rome, pp. 115–132.
16
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 60 (2020) 101232
Weiner, A.B., 1992. Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving.
University of California Press, Berkeley.
Wengrow, D., 2008. Prehistories of Commodity Branding. Curr. Anthropol. 49, 7–34.
https://doi.org/10.1086/523676.
Wengrow, D., 1998. 'The changing face of clay': Continuity and change in the transition
from village to urban life in the Near East. Antiquity 72, 783–795.
Westbrook, R., Jasnow, R. (Eds.), 2001. Security for Debt in Ancient Near Eastern Law.
Brill, Leiden.
Wilkinson, T.C., 2014. Tying the Threads of Eurasia: Trans-regional Routes and Material
Flows in Transcaucasia, Eastern Anatolia and Western Central Asia, c.3000-1500BC.
Sidestone Press, Leiden.
Winter, I.J., 1987. Legitimation of authority through image and legend: seals belonging to
officials in the administrative bureaucracy of the Ur III state. In: Gibson, M., Biggs,
R.D. (Eds.), The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near
East. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago, pp. 69–116.
Wright, H.T., 1977. Recent research on the origin of the state. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 6,
379–397.
Wright, H.T., Johnson, G.A., 1975. Population, exchange, and early state formation in
Southwestern Iran. Am. Anthropol. 77, 267–289. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1975.
77.2.02a00020.
Wright, R., 1993. Technological styles: Transforming a natural material into a cultural
object. In: Lubar, S., Kingery, W.D. (Eds.), History from Things: Essays on Material
Culture. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, pp. 242–269.
Wright, R.P., 2018. Comparative perspectives and early states revisited. In: Brooke, J.L.,
Strauss, J.C., Anderson, G. (Eds.), State Formations. Cambridge University Press, pp.
73–89. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108241380.006.
Wright, R.P., 2016. Cognitive codes and collective action at Mari and the Indus. In:
Fargher, L.F., Espinoza, V.Y.H. (Eds.), Alternative Pathways to Complexity;
Households, Markets, World Systems, and Political Economy. University of Colorado
Press, Boulder.
Wright, R.P., 2010. The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy and Society. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Wright, R.P., 2002. The origin of cities. In: Ember, M., Ember, C.R. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of
Urban Cultures: Cities and Cultures around the World. Grolier, Danbury, CT, pp.
3–11.
Wright, R.P., 1991. Patterns of technology and the organization of production at Harappa.
In: Meadow, R.H. (Ed.), Harappa Excavations 1986–1900: A Multidisciplinary
Approach to Third Millennium Urbanism. Prehistory Press, Madison, WI, pp. 71–88.
Yoffee, N., 2005. Myths of the Archaic State Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and
Civilizations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Zelizer, V.A., 2000. The purchase of intimacy. Law Soc. Inq. 25, 817–848. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2000.tb00162.x.
Zettler, R.L., 1987. Sealings as Artifacts of Institutional Administration in Ancient
Mesopotamia. J. Cuneiform Stud. 39, 197–240. https://doi.org/10.2307/1359781.