A ‘sink’ for surplus labour

Many forms of livestock production are land-extensive and labour non-intensive when compared to agricultural production, especially with grazing/browsing livestock. But ethnographies of herders in regions with low human population densities consistently note that labour is a major limiting factor to herd growth. Should they wish to expand their flocks, household heads must seek ways of appropriating the surplus labour outside of their immediate kinship networks (see Bradburd Reference Bradburd1980; Gulliver Reference Gulliver1955; Næss Reference Næss2021). The surplus labour of poorer and especially stockless households offers one option, as documented among Kermani herders in Iran (Bradburd Reference Bradburd1980) and Aymara herders in Bolivia (Caro Reference Caro and Chang1994). Livestock production thus represents an advantageous means by which surplus-takers can employ surplus-givers with little additional investment, unlike in other types of production that often require greater outlays in tools and materials. The expandability of livestock can further stimulate demand for additional labour.

Extensification

The convertibility and expandability of wealth in livestock allows this sector of the economy to draw upon otherwise unused environmental resources. In steppic and semi-arid Eurasia and Africa, sheep, goats, horses and camels have historically enabled extensification into grasslands, while pig husbandry in Europe and Oceania enabled the productive mobilization of forests, parklands and wetlands. By increasing production through new pastureland inputs, the effect is the conversion of these marginal spaces into wealth-generating landscapes, with livestock acting like Rumpelstiltskin’s spinning wheel transforming straw into gold.

Multiplier effects

Livestock production articulates with other sectors of the economy to create a ‘multiplier effect’ on growth. The possibilities for these articulations are primarily due to the flexibility of wealth in livestock — livestock can be a means of production both to generate more livestock and a wider range of outputs, including human population growth — and their convertibility into other types of wealth. Broadly speaking, two types of industries articulate most strongly with livestock husbandry: the manufacture and recirculation of products derived from animals —e.g. milk, hides, fibres/textiles, bone tools — and the use of animal power in production or transportation. In both sectors, the accumulation of livestock can have major implications for wider labour relations, productivity, and the circulation of wealth.

Sherratt (Reference Sherratt1983) was attentive to some of the multiplier effects when he credited the ‘secondary products revolution’ with the emergence of economic specialization and urbanism in Eurasia and Africa. For Sherratt, what was ‘revolutionary’ was that the combination of new animal products facilitated economic growth through diversification (Sherratt Reference Sherratt1983, 100; see also Greenfield Reference Greenfield2010; Sabatini & Bergerbrant Reference Sabatini and Bergerbrant2020). If we accept that economic growth involves increasingly complex networks of circulation of everyday items (Hirth Reference Hirth2020; Wickham Reference Wickham2023), then the addition of new animal products (or the expansion of their availability) in increasing volumes within exchange networks can be expected to stimulate further production for exchange, and thus economic development.

Textile production provides a prime example. Because textiles often carry significant symbolic value (e.g. Kriger Reference Kriger2006), demand is elastic and can easily escalate, particularly though not exclusively from emergent elite consumers. Thus, textile production can be yet another sink for surplus labour. It can also precipitate growth in other economic sectors by stimulating demand for other types of craft production (to make textiles or exchange for them) and transportation. Woollen textile production played this role in the late medieval economic boom in Europe (Arrighi Reference Arrighi1994).

Traction power provides another set of multiplier effects on economic growth. Large bovids, camelids and equids enable both the intensification and extensification of agricultural production (through tasks including field clearing, ploughing and sowing), while also facilitating more rapid cereal processing and transportation. The increase in the productive potential of a person-hour can be dramatic (e.g. Halstead Reference Halstead2014, 42–5), freeing up surplus labour for other activities and promoting the expansion of grain surpluses. As means of transportation, draft animals enable the overland movement of larger quantities of products at lower cost than human porterage. If Hirth (Reference Hirth2020, 201) is correct that transport costs were the principal barrier to economic growth in the pre-industrial world, then livestock were transformative by, first, expanding the volume that could be traded or otherwise transferred overland and, second, enabling regional specialization. Both offered new opportunities for wealth accumulation.

Direct appropriation

Direct appropriation is the taking of wealth by violence, theft, or manipulation. In a kin-ordered mode of production, opportunities for direct appropriation within a kinship network are likely to be rare and heavily punished. But the appropriation of wealth from outside the network can be an appealing enterprise, especially raiding socially distant neighbours whose otherness places them outside of stricter normative orders. Livestock often are attractive targets of such raids, with their specific qualities of mobility (flexibility) and expandability. When regularized, such appropriations can develop into the more institutionalized forms of tribute taking that define the tributary mode of production — as argued elsewhere, livestock are particularly good to tax (Corcoran-Tadd et al. Reference Corcoran-Tadd, Price and Caramanica2023).

There are numerous examples of livestock’s place within the dynamics of predatory violence. Under Shaka, the Zulu developed a new war economy in which cattle taken in raids were redistributed to dependent chiefs, who then distributed those cattle to their clients, creating a chain of gifts-cum-political-subjectivity fuelled by violent expansion (Chanaiwa Reference Chanaiwa1980, 8–9). On the North American Plains, political economic developments among the Comanche, Blackfoot and Lakota turned upon the raiding and recirculation of horses (Hämäläinen Reference Hämäläinen2003). Meanwhile, the regular raids of Ethiopian emperors into Oromo lands, with the explicit goal of enriching the empire in livestock and enslaved people (Hassen Reference Hassen2022), show how the extraction of moveable wealth can lead to structural inequalities at the regional scale.

Household and community in the kin-ordered mode of production in the Neolithic

The first agricultural societies in northern Mesopotamia raised sheep, goat, cattle and pigs and were organized in a kin-ordered mode of production. When looking at the dynamics of surplus production and mobilization, one can detect two general types of institutions. The first, the household, incorporated the domestic residential unit and immediate kin networks. Domestic structures (‘houses’) are their primary material proxy. The other was the community, understood here as the institutions, usually organized around larger kinship structures or residential groupings, which served to address various collective action problems. Concretely, these could include patrilineal/matrilineal clans, ritual societies, and meeting houses, some of which are architecturally manifested in frequently attested ‘non-domestic’ structures of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B (PPNA and PPNB).

Atakuman (Reference Atakuman2014), Hodder (Reference Hodder2022) and Price and Makarewicz (Reference Price and Makarewicz2024) all detect a shift from community to household as the primary institution that mobilized surplus labour across the PPNB world. Each contends, though from different positions, that as social reproduction became enfolded within the property relations of agropastoral production, households exhibited greater self-sufficiency, undercutting the need to invest in mechanisms of community cohesion. Price and Makarewicz (Reference Price and Makarewicz2024) identify pastoralism as the key feature in this process. In their interpretation, the household supplanted the community as the predominant institution when wealth in livestock became the principal means of reproducing of wealth in people. In northern Mesopotamia, the cessation of large non-domestic buildings in the seventh millennium bce (e.g. at Çayönü Tepesi) potentially offers a material signature of these shifting relations of production (Atakuman Reference Atakuman2014).

The tension between household and community reflected structural contradictions. The desires to maintain egalitarian norms and build social cohesion through ritual ran up against the social imperatives to augment household membership, wealth and status (Atakuman Reference Atakuman2014; Hodder Reference Hodder2022). Such tensions were enduring and dialectical, leading to long-term cycling between community and household dominance in the kin-ordered mode of production.

This tension and the ensuing cycling are reflected in the diversity of political economic configurations across Neolithic Mesopotamia. Bernbeck (Reference Bernbeck1995) articulates differences between two late seventh-millennium bce cultural horizons, Hassunan and Samarran. Employing a mode of production framework and drawing on architectural layouts, he argues that Hassunan sites (e.g. Yarim Tepe I) were composed of cooperating ‘stem families’, with land held in common — what we term the community variant of the kin-ordered mode of production. This is based on the presence of apparently communal storage buildings, the relatively open layout of houses (with more than one entrance) and the use of space between houses for various activities. On the other hand, Samarran sites (e.g. Tell es-Sawwan) saw storage, cooking and pottery production all taking place within walled compounds and houses typically with single entrances, thus more clearly denoting private and public spheres. To Bernbeck (Reference Bernbeck1995), Samarran villages were composed of largely independent extended families with private ownership of land — the household variant.

While Bernbeck’s (Reference Bernbeck1995) interpretation of architectural data is open to debate, there is similar variation in the sixth millennium bce (comprising the Halaf period). Most villages were small and dispersed, with households forming the dominant social institutions. However, at sites including Tell Sabi Abyad (Burnt Village) (Akkermans & Verhoeven Reference Akkermans and Verhoeven1995), there are what appear to be public storage facilities, complete with sealings, which Frangipane (Reference Frangipane2007, 157) has interpreted as ‘a sophisticated administrative system, probably intended to control the redistribution of food stored in common by the community’. In addition to this apparently communal surplus pooling, there are hints of experiments with tributary relations, such as the Burnt House at Arpachiyah, seemingly the domicile of a wealthy family (Campbell Reference Campbell2000; Sanders Reference Sanders2020).

Feasting is frequently invoked in discussions of Neolithic southwest Asia (e.g. Dietrich et al. Reference Dietrich, Heun, Notroff, Schmidt and Zarnkow2012; Twiss Reference Twiss2008). Feasts are a way to translate surplus livestock and other foodstuffs into ‘wealth in people,’ but they can also work against such ties of dependence by emphasizing a sense of communitas (Dietler Reference Dietler, Dietler and Hayden2001; deFrance Reference deFrance2009). In other words, they can reproduce both household and community versions of the kin-ordered mode of production. Control over the narrative of a feast is often part of the drama, especially in larger ones. We can imagine such dynamics taking place at the massive feast represented by the ‘Death Pit’ at Domuztepe, c. 5575 bce (Kansa et al. Reference Kansa, Kennedy, Campbell and Carter2009; Lau et al. Reference Lau, Gordon and Knudson2021). At the smaller scale, the widespread distribution of fineware Halaf ceramics can be reasonably explained by extensive and competitive feasting between households (Nieuwenhuyse Reference Nieuwenhuyse, Córdoba, Molist, Pérez, Rbio and Martínez2008). Feasts at such smaller scales were probably easier to control discursively and likely helped reproduce the household as the keystone social institution.

We also see evidence for livestock spurring economic growth. Düring (Reference Düring2011, 122) has referred to a seventh- to sixth-millennia ‘Second Neolithic Revolution’ in which new techniques of animal exploitation enabled the extraction of storable products, namely milk and fibre (see also Nieuwenhuyse et al. Reference Nieuwenhuyse, Roffet-Salque, Evershed, Akkermans and Russell2015; Rooijakkers Reference Rooijakkers2012; Rosenstock et al. Reference Rosenstock, Ebert and Scheibner2021). Another animal product, dung, allowed intensified crop production, which is indicated by rising δ ¹⁵N values in plant and animal remains (Styring et al. Reference Styring, Charles and Fantone2017). The resulting increases in agricultural surplus coincided with, and likely facilitated, feasting, population increase (Palmisano et al. Reference Palmisano, Lawrence, De Gruchy, Bevan and Shennan2021, 12), some specialization in craft production domains (Carter et al. Reference Carter, Campbell and Gauld2003) and the expansion of obsidian exchange (Healey Reference Healey2007).

Community and economic growth in the Ubaid (Early Chalcolithic)

As the sixth millennium ended, the kin-order mode of production continued to dominate northern Mesopotamia. But especially during the Ubaid period (5200–4500 bce), cracks had begun to appear that suggest the occasional emergence of (proto-)tributary relations. On the one hand, there is little mortuary evidence for an elite stratum. On the other, survey data provide tentative evidence for structural inequality in the form of occasional two-tiered settlement hierarchies (Akkermans & Schwartz Reference Akkermans and Schwartz2003, 159; Stein Reference Stein2012, 129; Trentin Reference Trentin, Carter and Philip2010). Excavations at Tell Abada in the Hamrin Basin offer evidence that some households were pulling far ahead of their peers. Abada’s Building A was significantly larger than the surrounding houses and contained prestige items such as stone palettes and tokens, as well as many infant burials (Jasim Reference Jasim2021). One interpretation is that this house had taken on (or ‘hijacked’) some of the functions of community institutions, including the ownership of certain mortuary rituals. As it did so, it was able to mobilize surplus labour from beyond the sphere of kinship and strategically redistribute values — a prototype of the tributary mode of production.

Yet at other sites, community institutions were dominant. Monumental public structures, often called ‘temples’, were built at Eridu in the south (Safar et al. Reference Safar, Ali Mustafa and Lloyd1981) and Tepe Gawra (Level XIII) in the north (Rothman Reference Rothman and Butterlin2009). Another example comes from Tell Feres, where in level 10 (Late Ubaid) excavators found a large building with four attached pottery workshops and evidence of administration in the form of preformed clay sealings (Vallet Reference Vallet2018, 157). In the subsequent level 9 (c. 4600 BCE, Late Ubaid or Ubaid-LC 1 transitional), a ‘Grand Bâtiment’ contained a reception hall and storage areas (Vallet Reference Vallet2018). In such cases, monumental structures of a seemingly religious nature were the active sites where surplus labour was mobilized and organized for craft production. In contrast to the situation at Tell Abada, these contexts would seem to represent the nascent development of tributary relations within the community form of the kin-ordered mode of production.

There are several indications of economic growth during the Ubaid. Ceramic production underwent specialization, with people employing the slow-wheel (tournette), relying more heavily on chaff tempers and applying less surface decoration — techniques that accelerated and simplified the production process (Akkermans & Schwartz Reference Akkermans and Schwartz2003, 169–70; Kennedy Reference Kennedy2022). Meanwhile, copper artifacts, carved obsidian bowls and lapis lazuli beads offer evidence of the production of prestige goods and long-distance exchange (Stein Reference Stein2012, 130).

Not coincidentally, the animal economy also shows signs of transformation. First, some subregions (notably the Balikh Valley and the Amuq Plain) witnessed a marked increase in the ratio of domestic to wild taxa between the Halaf and Ubaid (Grossman & Hinman Reference Grossman and Hinman2013). Although not a regionwide pattern (Fig. 4), the evidence indicates the increasing importance of livestock in some places, potentially reflecting an expansion of herds. Additionally, isotopic (enamel δ¹³C and δ¹⁸O) evidence for vertically transhumant pastoralism at late sixth- to fifth-millennium bce Köşk Höyük, just northwest of northern Mesopotamia proper (Makarewicz et al. Reference Makarewicz, Arbuckle and Öztan2017), indicates specialized husbandry practices taking advantage of seasonal rainfall patterns in geographically complementary zones. Such extensification implies that sheep and goat herds were growing; it is likely that people were managing them in novel ways to supply feasts and use livestock for exchange. There are also hints that animal fibres were playing a more sizable economic role. Caprine kill-off data at some sites (e.g. Late Ubaid Kosak Shamali), suggest increased focus on wool extraction, although there is no transregional pattern in the kill-off data (Gourichon & Helmer Reference Gourichon, Helmer, Nishiaki and Matsutani2003; Price & Wolfhagen Reference Price and Wolfhagen2024), and spindle whorls consistent in size with those necessary for spinning animal fibres were recovered at some sites (Sudo Reference Sudo, Carter and Philip2010).

Figure 4. Violin plot of relative abundances of livestock (NISP of sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs) in faunal assemblages from northern Mesopotamia. Red dots show sites in which the proportion of caprines among domestic livestock is over 75 per cent and is taken as a proxy for specialized pastoralism. In the LC 4–5, Tell Kuran and Umm Qseir are interpreted as specialist hunting sites.

Household prominence in the Late Chalcolithic 1

Compared to the Ubaid, the LC 1 generally lacks public buildings; the household again became primary locus of labour mobilization (see Fisher Reference Fisher2017, 77). At Tell Feres, the ‘Grand Bâtiment’ of level 9b–9a (Ubaid-LC 1 transitional) had by level 8 (LC 1, c. 4400 bce) become a more modest structure with two kilns (Fisher Reference Fisher2017, 78; Vallet Reference Vallet2018). The ‘temples’ at Tepe Gawra XIII (Late Ubaid) were gone by Level XII; ritual activity now took place in large houses, notably the ‘White Room’ building (Rothman Reference Rothman and Butterlin2009). These included feasting, which has been amply demonstrated across the Late Ubaid and LC 1 horizons (Kennedy Reference Kennedy and Pollock2012; Proctor et al. Reference Proctor, Smith and Stein2022). Community-wide, or extra-household, ritual institutions did not disappear. For example, excavators uncovered a ‘non-domestic’ building at Tell Surezha filled with atypical finds including butchered dog and wolf bones (Harris Reference Harris2023; Price et al. Reference Price, Fisher and Stein2021; Stein & Fisher Reference Stein and Fisher2020). But these structures were far less substantial, reflecting the general lower levels of surplus mobilization.

Yet it would be misleading to characterize the LC 1 as a ‘return to normal’. Households during the LC 1 operated within a transformed context: changes in scale, technology and opportunities for inter-regional connectivity provided an economic foundation upon which competitive households could overwhelm and ultimately subvert relations of production. At this time, population began to increase significantly (Palmisano et al. Reference Palmisano, Lawrence, De Gruchy, Bevan and Shennan2021). In the domain of craft production, which largely occurred in or near houses, technological development notably included the first clear evidence for local copper smelting within northern Mesopotamia (Caneva et al. Reference Caneva, Palumbi and Pasquino2012, 366; Fisher Reference Fisher2017, 179) and pottery production became more efficient as decoration declined. Feedback between demographic and economic growth would have produced transformative scalar pressures. As some households looked to wider networks of economic circulation and social dependence, the older mode of accumulating wealth in people through the intimate ties of kinship proved an increasingly insufficient basis for defining the relations of production. Such households turned instead to accumulating symbolic value through long-distance exchange and, especially, controlling the means of cereal and livestock production (Stein Reference Stein2012).

Food was probably the key to greater mobilization of surplus labour. The rapidly made flint-scraped ‘Coba bowls’ and ‘wide flower pots’, generally found in association with domestic structures, likely point to scaled-up consumption or redistribution activities (Baldi Reference Baldi2012; Fisher Reference Fisher2017, 59–62), possibly ‘labour feasts’ held by competing households (Fisher Reference Fisher2017, 99–101; Kennedy Reference Kennedy and Pollock2012). If so, we can sketch the evolution of corvée: the commensal logic of the feast in the Neolithic through LC 1 — the counter-gifting of labour and food — was gradually transformed into ‘rationing’ — a calculated exchange of labour time for measured quantities of food. The persistence of these ceramic forms into the LC 2 in more institutional contexts, such as the Round Building at Tepe Gawra (Rothman Reference Rothman and Butterlin2009), would support this model.

While we do not know precisely what filled Late Chalcolithic bowls, meat and dairy were likely essential ingredients for labour feasts — indeed, organic residue analysis of later bevelled rim bowls show that such ‘ration bowls’ were sometimes filled with meat (Perrucchini et al. Reference Perruchini, Glatz and Heimvik2023). As an expandable source of wealth for early elites, herds could be grown rapidly and their offtake used to supply these feasts and, later, ‘rations’. But wealth in livestock was also flexible and production goals could be switched rapidly. In addition to providing meat, sheep could supply raw materials for textiles and cattle could be trained to pull ards or carry burdens.

Indeed, wool production may have been transformative. Here it is worth invoking Sherratt’s (Reference Sherratt1983) ‘secondary products revolution’ as well as McCorriston’s (Reference McCorriston1997) influential model, which holds that wool, easier to extract in bulk than linen, meant less labour needed for household textile production, thereby creating a pool of surplus labourers (particularly low-status women). This surplus labour was mobilized, she argues, by wealthy households and emerging ‘institutions’ for expanded, exchange-oriented textile production. Some have contested the details of the hypothesis, with Joffe (Reference Joffe2022) questioning whether linen was ever a common material for clothing. Nevertheless, the core facts remain: the demand for textiles was high and elastic, the use of wool expanded the workable volume of raw materials used in production, the processing of wool into textiles was a sink for surplus labour, and textiles were used in regional and inter-regional trade to acquire other goods, thereby stimulating demand and production in other sectors.

Zooarchaeological evidence for the expansion of wool production is equivocal, hampered by small sample sizes that make analysis of kill-off profiles problematic (Price & Wolfhagen Reference Price and Wolfhagen2024). While there are occasional changes in caprine husbandry at the local level, it seems that that tributary demands for textile production did not have as great an impact of herding decisions at a regional scale as often thought. Price and Wolfhagen (Reference Price and Wolfhagen2024) frame this in terms of the resilience of the subsistence economy in the face of a developing political economy marked by spatially patchy tribute mobilization.

Artefactual datasets offer an alternative line of evidence. At Tell Surezha, for example, spinning of wool is suggested by small-sized spindle whorls and a decline in the archaeobotanical assemblage of flax (Price et al. Reference Price, Fisher and Stein2021; Proctor et al. Reference Proctor, Smith and Stein2022). At a broader scale, Schoop (Reference Schoop, Horejs and Mehofer2014, 432) examined textile production evidence across Anatolia (including part of northern Mesopotamia as defined here) and identified a major uptick in the frequency of loom weights, spindle whorls and other textile-related artifacts beginning in the latter half of the fifth millennium bce. There was also evidence of houses with multiple looms, suggesting the development of specialized workshops. The evidence thus indicates a scalar increase in textile production, even if this did not initially have a region-wide impact on kill-off practices.

Draft cattle likely played a role in expanding the scope and capacity of production and exchange in the LC 1. Pathological lesions concentrated on the distal limbs of cattle remains from Tell Surezha could indicate increased use of traction power (Price et al. Reference Price, Fisher and Stein2021) — a development that may signify the beginnings of the extensification of cereal production through plough agriculture identified in isotopic data (Styring et al. Reference Styring, Charles and Fantone2017). Those households able to maintain working cattle would have been able to expand surplus production and loan their cattle to others in exchange for labour or rent.

At the same time, the exceptional potential mobility of caprine husbandry, especially in the process of extensification, may have assisted long-distance exchange. Strong stylistic parallels between sub-regions (especially between highland and lowland regions) suggest that households of the LC 1 were able to make contacts at longer distances and perhaps in some cases control trade routes (Alden et al. Reference Alden, Minc, Buehlman-Barbeau and Stein2021; Kennedy Reference Kennedy2022). One hypothesis is that these connections could have been forged, or otherwise facilitated, by transhumant pastoralists wintering in the lowlands (Abu Jayyab Reference Abu Jayyab2019). Those households owning large flocks would have been in prime positions to take advantage of the increased traffic in exchangeable commodities.

The tributary mode of the LC 2 and 3

During the LC 2 and LC 3, the inter-household competition of the LC 1 evolved into a more obvious tributary mode of production, one in which a stratum of elites based in regional centres appropriated surplus labour from a broad section of the population using new administrative techniques. Regional stratification is indicated by appearance of major centres, including Tell Brak (50 ha in the LC 2; 130 ha in the LC 3), that were unequivocally urban in character by the LC 3 (Lawrence & Wilkinson Reference Lawrence and Wilkinson2015; Ur Reference Ur2010). New forms of stratification are also visible in burials and architecture. In the LC 2, one finds child burials accompanied by prestige goods like gold and lapis lazuli (Stein Reference Stein2012, 135–6) and secular monumental architecture, such as the Round House at Gawra (Rothman Reference Rothman and Butterlin2009) and the Basalt Threshold Building at Brak TW 20 (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 310–11; McMahon et al. Reference McMahon, Oates and Al-Quntar2007). These structures appear to be large houses and to incorporate the general functions of households. They also show indications of storage of surplus, specialized craft production, large-scale feasting, prestige goods and administrative technology, suggesting the development of an institutional role for these effectively ‘aggrandized households’ emerging out of their control over key aspects of the economy in a period defined by a general trajectory of economic growth.

Some craft production remained independent, such as copper smelting at LC 2 Hacınebi (Stein Reference Stein2012, 136). But the elite institutions represented by the new monumental compounds were clearly able to support significant numbers of attached craft specialists and transform labour processes. Pottery production, for example, became more efficient as potters relied more on chaff temper to hasten drying (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 312–13). Significantly, woollen textile production expanded. Zooarchaeological data indicate that larger-sized sheep appear in northern Mesopotamia in the LC 1 and LC 2, possibly a wool-producing population (Vila & Helmer Reference Vila, Helmer, Breniquet and Michel2014; see also Price & Wolfhagen Reference Price and Wolfhagen2024). Spindle-whorl size, which remained small (optimal for spinning wool), became standardized at Tell Brak, suggesting specialization of textile production (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 302).

Brak’s trench TW sequence provides an example of the range and scale of production directly controlled by elite institutions, and the central role played by feasting in labour mobilization. In the LC 2 (TW level 20), diverse production activities were associated with a monumental building, including cooking, textile production and stone working (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 314; Oates et al. Reference Oates, McMahon, Karsgaard, Al Quntar and Ur2007, 590). In the succeeding TW level 19 (LC 2–3), the new Red Libn Building was constructed, ‘a massive industrial building with large kilns, basins, grinding stones, and storage’ (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 314). Excavators at Tell Brak also recovered mass-produced bowls in the LC 2 levels and a numerical tablet (suggesting administrative accounting). Finally, in the TW level 18 (LC 3), excavators found a large ‘Feasting Hall’ complete with ovens, ceramic plates and a large number of caprine and cattle remains (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 311; Oates et al. Reference Oates, McMahon, Karsgaard, Al Quntar and Ur2007, 594–6).

Such feasts provided a means by which appropriated surplus could be transformed into political power. At the same time, feasting had a clear economic logic: by reinvesting a portion of the appropriated surplus back into the population, elites could appropriate additional units of surplus labour necessary to maintain the tributary cycle. As such, it was a powerful tool for emergent institutions within a new tributary mode of production — and one in which livestock served both as victuals and agents of traction.

To fuel feasts and feed dependents, elites and their institutions required regular supplies of animals and their products. From the perspective of the surplus-taker (and with apologies to Lévi-Strauss), livestock are good to tax, especially mobile herd animals like caprines and cattle. The emerging cities became nodes of animal movement, forming central places for the collection, processing (plucking, milking, slaughtering) and distribution of livestock. Indeed, the regular movements of sheep, goats and cattle between hinterlands and cities carved out some of the ‘hollow ways’ that radiate out from fourth- and third-millennium sites (Casana Reference Casana2013; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson1993). As nodes of pastoralist extensification into the more arid parts of the ‘zone of uncertainty’ and the mountainous terrain to the north, cities and the elites within them could tap the riches of these pastures of plenty. At the same time, the extensification of agriculture, which increased extractable cereal surpluses (Styring et al. Reference Styring, Charles and Fantone2017), was almost certainly facilitated by ox and ard.

Figure 4 shows NISP data for domestic and wild taxa in northern Mesopotamia over time. The LC 2 coincides with the first quantitative and transregional jump in ratio of domestic to wild taxa. This shift likely reflects both a decline of hunting and (more significantly) the expansion of herds. Henceforth, domestic species truly dominate zooarchaeological assemblages (around 95 per cent), with the notable exception of hunting specialist sites like Tell Kuran (Bar-Oz et al. Reference Bar-Oz, Zeder and Hole2011). Such sites could represent new elite demands for unusual animal products (gazelle skins) or, tantalizingly, efforts to escape the tributary mode of production.

Finally, violence appears to increase around 4000 bce. Evidence includes the burning of the Round House at Tepe Gawra XIa (c. 4200 bce, LC 2), mass graves at Tell Majnuna near Brak (3800–3600 bce) and the sacking of Tell Hamoukar (c. 3500 bce) (McMahon Reference McMahon2020, 324; McMahon et al. Reference McMahon, Sołtysiak and Weber2011; Rothman Reference Rothman and Butterlin2009, 24). The increase in scale and frequency of organized inter-community violence is consistent with expectations for a tributary mode of production, with its focus on the extraction of surplus value from producers by other-than-economic means. Again, we posit that animal wealth was often a target of (or a reward for) violence; indeed, ancient texts from later periods document that livestock were frequently taken as booty in war (Corcoran-Tadd et al. Reference Corcoran-Tadd, Price and Caramanica2023, 124).

For Chalcolithic elites (as for competitive household heads in the previous Neolithic), livestock offered a significantly expandable source of wealth, a resource that could be grown relatively quickly, while also able to be converted into other values. And the flexibility of animal wealth was also surely attractive, allowing for strategic shifts between subsistence and craft production and for mobility across growing networks of social connectivity and political dependence. Apart from ‘wealth in people’, no other source of wealth in the ancient world had such versatility in so many domains. As human communities were reconfigured across northern Mesopotamia into new social formations, animal herds offered a key basis for the rapid and unequal economic growth that made the Late Chalcolithic a watershed moment in the region’s history.