Some of the notable changes in Edomite society include political consolidation, economic expansion, and changes in religious practices and beliefs. As a complement to this expanded database, cross-cultural examples of cultural contact and imperial expansion are adduced in order to explain the nature of Assyrian impact on Iron II Edom (eighth-sixth centuries BCE). Alongside the biblical accounts of Edom, various other primary bodies of data are examined local epigraphs, Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, and the ever-growing corpus of material culture from ancient Edom. It goes beyond traditional syntheses of Edomite history, typically based on the brief Edomite notices found in various portions of the biblical text. This dissertation explores Assyria's role in Edom's socio-political transformation. Assyrian, local Edomite documents, and material cultural remains, however, indicate that Edom developed as a polity in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, the period of Assyrian expansion in the region. The Hebrew Bible places Edom's foundation within the narrative context of Israel's Exodus from Egypt that scholars have traditionally dated to the thirteenth-twelfth centuries BCE. By demonstrating that a multitude of factors affect the nature and consequences of intersocietal contacts, his book advocates a much-needed balance between recognizing that no society can be understood in complete isolation from its neighbors and assuming the primacy of outside contact in a society's development. Such evidence, argues Stein, shows that we must look more closely at the local cultures of peripheries to develop realistic cross-cultural models of variation in colonialism, exchange, and secondary state formation in ancient societies. Comparing economic data from pre- and postcontact phases, Stein shows that the Mesopotamians did not dominate the people of this distant periphery. Whereas some scholars have considered this "Uruk expansion" to be one of the earliest documented world-systems, Stein uses data from the site of Hacinebi in southeastern Turkey to support his alternate perspective.
He tests his models against the archaeological record of Mesopotamian expansion into the Anatolian highlands during the fourth millennium B.C. In this new study, Stein proposes two complementary theoretical frameworks for the study of interregional interaction: a "distance-parity" model, which views world-systems as simply one factor in a broader range of intersocietal relations, and a "trade-diaspora" model, which explains variation in exchange systems from the perspective of participant groups. Gil Stein now offers the first rigorous test of world systems as a model in archaeology, arguing that the application of world-systems theory to noncapitalist, pre-fifteenth-century societies distorts our understanding of developmental change by overemphasizing the role of external over internal dynamics.
The use of world-systems theory to explain the spread of social complexity has become accepted practice by both historians and archaeologists.
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