An attempt has been made to determine if the material parameters in constitutive equations for inelastic deformation which fully accommodate the deformation history dependence of inelastic properties can be evaluated with sufficient accuracy at elevated confining pressures for such equations to be of interest in characterizing geological materials. Accordingly, a large number of constant displacement rate and load relaxation experiments (or variants thereof) have been conducted on Carrara marble at 200 MPa confining pressure in the temperature range 120 to 400 ¿C, and the results have been interpreted in terms of Hart's state variable description of inelastic deformation. The observed mechanical behavior conforms to Hart's description, with a changeover at about 250 ¿C from deformation rate controlled by dislocation glide controlled processes (as represented by concave upward (log &egr;˙, log &sgr;) load relaxation curves), to rate control by strongly thermally activated processes (as represented by concave downward relaxation curves). All relaxation curves generated at a given temperature may be superposed by a translation in fixed direction in the (log &egr;˙, log &sgr;) plane. This defines a master relaxation curve which represents what any individual relaxation curve would look like if it could be determined over a sufficiently wide range of strain rates. For concave downward relaxation curves the master curve extends over 9 orders of magnitude of strain rate and, in consequence, substantially eases the problem of extrapolating the laboratory data to geological strain rates. The success of Hart's description in accounting for the mechanical behavior means that it is possible to avoid the steady state approximation both in the experimental evaluation of inelastic flow laws and in the application of those flow laws in geophysical modeling problems. Moreover, it provides a simple method of quantifying the mechanical state of a material and thereby is of potential significance for the problem of correlating microstructural observations with mechanical properties.