444" FURTHER READINGS
of the Alphabet (Leiden: Brill, 1982), traces the emergence of alphabets in the eastern Mediterranean region. The remarkable Ugaritic alphabet is the subject of Gernot Windfuhr, "The cuneiform signs of Ugarit," Journal ofNear Eastern Studies 29:48-51 (1970). Joyce Marcus, MesoamericanWriting Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Elizabeth Boone and Walter Mignolo, Writing without Words (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), describe the development and uses of Mesoamerican writing systems. William Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the ChineseWriting System (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1994), and the same author's "Early Chinese writing," World Archaeology 17:420-36 (1986), do the same for China. Finally, Janet Klausner, Sequoyah's Gift (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), is an account readable by children, but equally interesting to adults, of Sequoyah's development of the Cherokee syllabary.
Chapter 13
The standard detailed history of technology is the eight-volume A History of Technology, by Charles Singer et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954-84). One-volume histories are Donald Cardwell, The Fontana History of Technology (London: Fontana Press, 1994), Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), and Trevor Williams, The History of Invention (New York: Facts on File, 1987),; R. A. Buchanan, The Power of the Machine (London: Penguin Books,,; 1994), is a short history of technology focusing on the centuries since A.D.| 1700. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches (New York: Oxford University*! Press, 1990), discusses why the rate of development of technology has va ied with time and place. George Basalla, The Evolution of Technolog (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), presents an evolutionatf| view of technological change. Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovatic 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1983), summarizes modern research on l transfer of innovations, including the QWERTY keyboard. David He loway, Stalin and the Bomb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 199 dissects the relative contributions of blueprint copying, idea diffusion p espionage), and independent invention to the Soviet atomic bomb.
Preeminent among regional accounts of technology is the series
FURTHERREADINGS • 445
and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), of which 5 volumes in 16 parts have appeared since 1954, with a dozen more parts on the way. Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald Hill Islamic Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and K. D. White, Creek and Roman Technology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), summarize technology's history for those cultures.
Two conspicuous examples of somewhat isolated societies adopting and then abandoning technologies potentially useful in competition with other societies involve Japan's abandonment of firearms, after their adoption in a.d. 1543, and China's abandonment of its large oceangoing fleets after a.d. 1433. The former case is described by Noel Perrin, Giving Up theGun (Boston: Hall, 1979), and the latter by Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). An essay entitled "The disappearance of useful arts," pp. 190-210 in W. H. B. Rivers, Psychology and Ethnology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), gives similar examples among Pacific islanders.
Articles on the history of technology will be found in the quarterly journal Technology and Culture, published by the Society for the History of Technology since 1959. John Staudenmaier, Technology's Storytellers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), analyzes the papers in its first twenty years.
Specific fields providing material for those interested in the history of technology include electric power, textiles, and metallurgy. Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), discusses the social, economic, political, and technical factors in the electrification of Western society from 1880 to 1930. Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York: Walker, 1995), describes the development of John Har-nson's chronometers that solved the problem of determining longitude at sea. E. J. W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), sets out the history of cloth in Eurasia from its beginnings more than 9,000 years ago. Accounts of the history of metallurgy over wide regions or even over the world include Robert Maddin, The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), Theodore Wertime and James Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), R. D. Penhallurick, Tin inAntiquity (London: Institute of Metals, 1986), James Muhly, "Copper and ln, Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 3;155-535 (1973), and Alan Franklin, Jacqueline Olin, and Theodore
4 4 6 'FURTHERREADINGS
Wertime, The Search for Ancient Tin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978). Accounts of metallurgy for local regions include R. F. Tylecote, The Early History of Metallurgy in Europe (London: Longman, 1987), and Donald Wagner, Iron and Steel in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1993).
Chapter 14
The fourfold classification of human societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states owes much to two books by Elman Service: Primitive Social Organization (New York: Random House, 1962) and Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975). A related classification of societies, using different terminology, is Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House, 1967). Three important review articles on the evolution of states and societies are Kent Flannery, "The cultural evolution of civilizations," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3:399-426 (1972), the same author's "Prehistoric social evolution," pp. 1-26 in Carol and Melvin Ember, eds., Research Frontiers in Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1995), and Henry Wright, "Recent research on the origin of the state," Annual Review of Anthropology 6:379-97 (1977). Robert Carneiro, "A theory of the origin of the state," Science 169:733-38 (1970), argues that states arise through warfare under conditions in which land is ecologically limiting. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), relates state origins to large-scale irrigation and hydraulic management. Three essays in On the Evolution of Complex Societies, by William Sanders, Henry Wright, and Robert Adams (Malibu: Undena»J 1984), present differing views of state origins, while Robert Adams, 7M Evolution of Urban Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), contrasts state origins in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.
Among studies of the evolution of societies in specific parts of the world, sources for Mesopotamia include Robert Adams, Heartland Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and J. N. Postga* Early Mesopotamia (London: Routledge, 1992); for Mesoamerica, ard Blanton et al., Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, Zapc Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); for the Andes,-,