working there. This massive amount of fieldwork and surveying have resulted in substantial and significant publications. One of the first of Adams’s articles, with Jacobsen, was published in Science in 1958, and it reached a large public, including archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians as well as students of Near Eastern history and culture. That article was an indication of the direction his career was to take. Formally, it reported on a study of the feasibility of new irrigation schemes, deep drainage, and other agricultural projects that could be mobilized as a result of the new oil revenues flowing into Iraq, but the authors provided a historical background to the project and explained why land that was once productive had gone to ruin.

Adams’s essays in City Invincible: A Symposium of Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East (1960) and his book The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (1966) feature concerns with comparative social theory, ethnographic analogy, and a long-term historical lens. These elements were to characterize all his subsequent writing.

The Evolution of Urban Society, which became an instant classic in anthropology, provided a detailed comparison between the two best-known cases of the evolution of ancient states and so fulfilled Eggan’s requirement for “controlled comparison” as the hallmark of anthropological analysis. In its day, the book represented the best that anthropological archaeology had to offer. It identified similarities in development among different ancient states while not unduly reducing the differences and diversity among states. It showed that archaeologists were the anthropologists who could actually study the evolution of states while social anthropologists who had done most of the talking and writing about social evolution had no way to test any of their views. The book made famous Childe’s list of the traits of ancient states, which had been published in an obscure essay, even though it seriously qualified Childe’s discussion.

Adams decisively influenced the course of social evolutionary theory with his argument against Karl Wittfogel’s assertion that the requirements of large-scale irrigation caused the rise and determined the character of ancient states. By ranging through major New World examples as well as adducing the appropriate Mesopotamian data, Adams demonstrated that large-scale irrigation was the consequence, not the cause, of dynastic states.

More than thirty years after the publication of the book, Adams’s ideas are still pertinent and challenging. The transformations in social organization that accompanied the new political and economic relations in early states, a subject taken up by Adams in his chapter on kin and class, have been much debated. His exploration of the ideological forms of political leadership as contested ground, and hence as engines of change, was advanced by archaeologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a principle object of research.

Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement of the Diyala Plains (1965) was the result of an international development project in the Diyala River basin from new directions in settlement pattern studies. Among them Adams added, crucially, the employment of aerial photos, detailed ethnographic and historical documentation, and a commitment to a long-term historical perspective (which he developed quite independently from the work of French historian Fernand Braudel). Adams’s archaeologial purview—proceeding from the prehistoric Ubaid period to a.d. 1900 (ca. 7,000 years)—and his abundant and appropriate use of specialized geomorphological, ethnographic, and historic data make his case for a holistic compre-hension of the past.

Whereas Land behind Baghdad focused on post-Mesopotamian settlement patterns, The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies (1972) transformed extant knowledge of early urbanization in mesopotamia. This book was jointly authored with German archaeologist Hans J. Nissen and comprises two interrelated leitmotivs. The first is the development of southern Mesopotamia into the first urban society in world history. The second is the puzzling fact that today, this same region is virtually empty of towns and intensive agriculture. The book’s conclusion is a meditation on the destablizing force of central government.

The same two themes remain central in the