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Archaeological and historical reconstructions and interpretations of the origins and development of early state organizations and nomadic‐sedentary relations have been viewed primarily from the perspective of sedentary farmers and urban centers. Implicit in such models are assumptions of asymmetric power relationships in which nomads are viewed as not only dependent on settled farmers but also encapsulated within the sphere of urban civilizations. This unidirectional view of political economy also derives from an overdependence on the skewed and biased ancient literature and some twentieth century ethnographic views of nomads in relation to powerful nation‐states. This paper offers a series of alternative inferences that are based on well‐known archaeological data, as well as a few recent lines of evidence, and a review of relevant archaeological evidence for the existence of social hierarchy and stratification in prehistoric pastoral nomadism in southwestern Iran. In addition, we discuss how vertical mob...

During the Proto-Elamite period, 3300-2800 B.C., a political and economic hegemony seems to have arisen in the southwestern highlands of Iran. The power of this hegemony was derived from its control over the major trade routes between the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia; its extent is defined by shared styles in ceramics, art, and architecture and by the use of a distincitive system of writing and recording. Proto-Elamite influence grew rapidly during the last centuries of the 4th millennium B.C. and declined equally rapidly when maritime trade through the Persian Gulf was established several centuries later. This reconstruction is supported by independent evidence-the ratios of imported to exported materials-from Farukhabad, a site outside the Proto-Elamite sphere of influence in lowland western Iran. This paper emphasizes the role that long-distance trade can play in the rise and decline of prehistoric complex societies. Proto-Elamite hegemony was a political and social phenomenon but was based on explo...

This paper presents the correspondences in verbal morphologies to support the existing lexical and other morphological evidence (reported elsewhere) that the Dravidian language family is closely cognate with Elamite. It uses primarily Achaemenid Elamite, for which the most detail is available, and in particular the description of the verb given by R. T. Hallock. A great deal of use is made of Dravidian Ver Morphology by P. S. Subrahmanyam. For one of the two basic tenses in both Dravidian and Elamite, the nonpast, it is shown that there is an item-for-item correspondence in the verbal morphologies for all surviving forms. This is obvious only after a reinterpretation of Proto-Dravidian verbal morphology. For the other basic tense, it is shown that significant correspondences exist in spite of major changes. Also, parallel shifts in verb classes for an intransitive/transitive contrast are shown to be cognate. Other verbal forms, including the auxiliaries, are discussed.