Graeber / Wengrow 420: current evidence suggests that "the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities"
"tiny prehistoric settlements in the Middle East [...] more than 2,000 years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling a city"
Tell Sabi Abyad (in what is modern-day Syria)—a village of around 150 people, who had erected "central storage facilities, including granaries and warehouses" and also "emplyed administrative devices of some complexity to keep track of what was in them," including pre-literacy "economic archives"
"writing, as such, would not appear for another 3,000 years," however, they did have "geometric tokens made of clay" and "identifying signs" in the form of "miniature seals bearing engraved designs" used to mark the clay stoppers of household vessels
421: "Perhaps most remarkably, the stoppers themselves, once removed from the vessles, were kept and archived in a special building—an office or bureau of sorts—near the centre of the village for later reference"
"archaeologists have been debating in whose interests and for what purpose such 'village bureaucracies' functioned"
Note that "the central bureau and depot of Tell Sabi Abyad is not associated with any kind of unusually large residenc, rich burials, or other signs of personal status." The town dwellings "are all roughly equal in size, quality, and surviving contents"
for roughly 2000 years, "people living in small-scale communities began to act as if they were already living in mass societies of a certain kind, even though nobody had ever seen a city" (422)
this may have helped to establish a "cultural uniformity" which allowed for "distant housholds and families" in different settlements to interrelate ("In a sense, then, this was the first era of the 'global village'")