The question of ‘elites’: real people or mysterious agents? Elitism as a convenient recourse to interpret social change in prehistoric Southwestern Asia (from the origins of sedentism to the ‘Uruk phenomenon’)

Abstract

This article analyzes current theoretical discourses within the Neolithic and Chalcolithic research of Southwestern Asia, which is still dominated by interpretations that assume a progression of increased hierarchization. Whether explicitly or implicitly, social evolutionary thinking still pervades our scholarship, and prevents innovative theory-building. This entails an inability to break with heuristics of ‘origins’ inherited from the past (e.g. “from the origins of domestication to the origins of civilization”), even though old and new discoveries, when integrated, are already pointing towards alternative research pathways. Sedentism, domestication, and urbanism were all complex, protracted, non-linear processes. Yet, the visualization of an ‘Uruk phenomenon’ expanding over large areas of Mesopotamia during the 4th millennium BC, ridden with problematic inconsistencies, still heralds the triumphal rise of civilization. Instead of relying on obsolete political and economic theories, or fake economy/ritual dichotomies, the investigation of social intelligence and the articulation of the biosocial in the landscape and within the prehistoric community should be a priority. The ‘agency’ of ‘elites’ is merely an interpretive deus ex machina helping scholars deal with the many difficulties and uncertainties of their research.