Guillermo Algaze has often
waded into the Tigris River in southeast Turkey and gazed south
toward Iraq. It is a land he has long wanted to explore, but political
instability has made that virtually impossible. However, now a new
constitution and the prospect of elections could soon enable archaeologists
to resume digging in Iraq after decades of neglect.
Algaze, who is chair of
UCSD's Anthropology Department, was awarded a $500,000 no-strings-attached
MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in October 2003. His 1993
book, The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early
Mesopotamian
Civilization , is a highly influential study about the growth of
early Sumerian civilization, an informal empire spread along the
fertile alluvium
of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq. Algaze has
combined his extensive experience excavating archaeological sites
in Turkey and Iran with modern economic principles to create a
controversial
theory about how urban civilization first arose more than 5,000
years ago in southern Mesopotamia, the “land between two rivers.”
Algaze
has proposed that the first city-states appeared in Mesopotamia
because of capitalistic industrialization. He believes that the
emergence of civilization should not be defined by the use of
bronze or iron
as much as by new ways of organizing labor, producing goods and
building trade.
Uruk was one of the first
urban centers in the world, and Algaze claims that its precocious
social hierarchy of traders, artisans, scribes and builders was
the likely driving force of its urban growth. That and factors such
as the region's strategic geographic location, efficient modes of
river transportation, mild climate and productive agriculture put
the boom in the world's first boomtowns. In other words, he sees
Uruk (referred to in the Old Testament as Erech) as an industrial
Chicago in the Mesopotamian farm belt.
Over thousands of years,
windblown sand has covered the ruins of ancient Uruk and other city-states
in southern Iraq. But during the 4th millennium B.C., the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers provided easy transportation of wool, wheat
and other commodities from the north down to the south. Temples
dominated the city-states that have been excavated, and Algaze believes
it was innovative temple administrators who fired the engines of
economic progress. The clerics took advantage of the highly productive
fields of wheat to the north and the more salt-tolerant barley grown
farther south. They accumulated large surpluses of grain, which
permitted them to feed a captive pool of laborers.
Evidence suggests that,
as temple administrators accumulated food and wool, they also assumed
control over specialized textile workers and organized them to produce
colorful cloth. Archaeologists have excavated shellfish and other
sea creatures used to produce colorful textile dyes, which were
superior to plant-derived tints.
Sheep, goats and cattle
were the first to be domesticated, but Algaze believes the humble
donkey may have played a central role in Mesopotamia. Its domestication
may have provided the “tipping point” that enabled Uruk's administrators
and entrepreneurs to transport fine textiles and highly crafted
pottery along the trade routes, thus increasing their wealth through
trade.
The evidence of great wealth
is indisputable. Uruk's huge mud-brick buildings were decorated
with beautiful mosaics and works of art. The architectural sophistication
and economic power of Uruk and similar Mesopotamian cities, which
were also centered around temple precincts, fundamentally set them
apart from all other previous human settlements. “Early Mesopotamian
society would have looked very much like Stalinist Russia,” says
Algaze, “with Stalin as both the king and the chief priest.”
The conditions were ripe
for the crystallization of a new socioeconomic structure. Using
terms borrowed from economics, Algaze argues that the ecological
diversity and bounty of the warm, moist river valleys also offered
an unmatched “comparative advantage” to those who learned to exploit
it. “Industrialization. People have not used that word to apply
to ancient societies mostly out of ignorance,” says Algaze. “Whether
we realize it or not, we operate on the Marxist paradigm, which
essentially says that industrial, capitalist societies only emerged
on the face of the earth starting in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Marx was correct in some respects, but he missed the starting date
by thousands of years.”
Algaze is not, however,
without his critics. Archaeologists who explain the emergence of
civilization in the first city-states with humanistic language or
analogies have disagreed with his analytical, scientific approach.
“Guillermo has a real gift for cross-disciplinary approaches, and
he's brought fresh theoretical fodder into the discipline,” says
Joy McCorriston, associate professor of anthropology at Ohio State
University. “It's not unusual to have a reaction against such a
new idea in anthropology.”
Charles Stanish, an anthropology
professor at UCLA, also notes the impact that Algaze's cross-disciplinary
approach has had. “He takes on the big questions, brings to bear
political, economic and other models, and makes us think about the
notion of early ‘state societies' in different and exciting ways,”
says Stanish. “Some love it, some hate it, but if you look throughout
the history of science, the greatest contributions always begin
as the most contentious. At the same time, nobody disputes the fact
that Guillermo is one of the most innovative minds in the business.”
Even as an undergraduate
at the University of Puerto Rico, the Cuban-born Algaze was fascinated
by the birth of civilization. He was inspired by scholarly books
on early civilizations, particularly The Evolution of Urban Society:
Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Aldine de Gruyter, Berlin
and New York, 1966) by Robert McC. Adams. As a graduate student
at the University of Chicago in 1977, Algaze studied with McC. Adams
and began conducting archaeological surveys in Iran. However, the
overthrow of the U.S.-backed shah two years later and the taking
of American hostages prevented Algaze from re-entering the country.
Then, after Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq in 1979, foreign
researchers were required to show a baptismal certificate in order
to enter. This effectively prevented Algaze and other Jewish scientists
from working there. Algaze next focused his attention on urban ruins
in southeast Turkey, and has excavated there for 20 years.
 While coping with the baking
heat of summer digs in Iran and Turkey, Algaze never lost his cool
or his passion to explore. “He is very, very serious about his work,
but he's very funny, pleasant and self-deprecating, and he treats
everybody with respect,” says Gil Stein, the director of Chicago's
Oriental Institute, who did field work with Algaze in Turkey when
both were graduate students.
Algaze exhibited early
potential as a university departmental chair by successfully leading
archaeological digs in hot, inhospitable locales. Colleagues describe
him as adept at dealing simultaneously with host countries' governmental
entities, local landlords and village leaders. At the same time,
he wrote grant applications, and coordinated the logistics of bringing
in crews and equipment from around the world. He somehow satisfied
security officials and police who were suspicious of foreigners,
examined everything that his crews dug up, and even broke up fights
between crew members while also keeping them well fed. “People vote
with their feet, and they would come back year after year to work
with Guillermo because he is such a good person,” says Stein.
Algaze's peers and friends
describe him as unfailingly kind and generous in the Old World tradition
of a gentleman, while he also chafes at outmoded modes of organizing
academic research. “I call myself a social scientist,” Algaze says.
“I look at issues of historical development over time. I am a historian
who doesn't use historical methods; I use archaeological methods
instead.”
And meanwhile he waits
to finally cross the Tigris River and use those archaeological methods
in Iraq. 
Rex Graham is
a freelance writer based in San Diego.
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