The concept of political complexity emerged in early centralized state societies (see Civilization and Urbanism, Rise of), where philosophers and historians developed typologies or continua to describe domestic organization and civil institutions of their own societies, as well as to rank their ‘barbarian’ neighbors relative to their own perceived organizational and cultural superiority. Notions of progress toward civil society date at least to classical antiquity - Aristotle’s Politics distinguishes between the patriarchal household (otKog), small villages and regional polities, and the city-state (nOlig), a continuum based on the same distinction between kin-ordered (societas) and civil societies (civitas) seen later in Latin literature. Early formulations of concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ reflect a coreperiphery model of contemporary political arrangements with slight attention dedicated to diachronic aspects of social evolution. In writings from classical antiquity and the Renaissance, political complexity tends to be conceptualized as a quality that is concentrated in the here-and-now, one that diminishes when moving backward in time or outward in space.
Contemporary archaeological approaches to political complexity are intimately tied to colonialism and the same kinds of teleological and ethnocentric constructions of ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’ seen among earlier writers. The first European archaeologists focused on unraveling the prehistory of their own nation-states and exploring the ruins of ancient civilizations in the classical world (and, later, in their colonies). By the eighteenth century, archaeologists were beginning to recognize large-scale technological developments occurring in European prehistory, which became the basis for cross-cultural comparisons and regional chronologies. In the early 1800s, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen formulated a system of three prehistoric ages (Stone, Bronze, and Iron) that was based on technological innovations. Continued archaeological research refined the three-age system for European archaeological sequences, which, thus derived, provided a material-culture platform for subsequent evolutionary theories.
The nineteenth century saw attempts to develop global approaches to cultural development that could be used in synchronic and diachronic analyses. Those formulated in anthropology presumed an evolution of social complexity that was unidirectional and unilineal, one that could be linked to specific sociocultural practices and material culture. The evolutionary approaches of Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward Taylor, and others drew from the writings of classical antiquity, the Old Testament, and accounts of European travelers; they also took into account the relative chronologies developed by European archaeologists. For example, Morgan, in his Ancient Society (1867), laid out a seven-stage typology through which human societies had risen from conditions of savagery to civilization (Figure 1). Each step toward civilization was achieved by the innovation or adoption of a new economic resource or technology - fishing/fire, bow and arrow, pottery, food production/durable architecture, iron metallurgy, and writing.
While evolutionary theories were widely rejected in the first half of the twentieth century (particularly by Boasian anthropologists in the United States),
Figure 1 Morgan’s seven-step evolutionary sequence from Ancient Society.
Archaeologists continued to use classification systems and were influenced by their underlying assumptions of societal progress. The three-age system proved a useful heuristic for approaching prehistoric technological innovation and diffusion in Europe, but was problematic for other parts of the world, where political complexity lacked the same sequence of innovations and technologies in those materials. Archaeologists came to recognize that the material from which a tool was made was of less social significance than the use to which such a tool was put; this inspired the development of evolutionary approaches that focused on ecology, energetics, and economic innovations.
Unlike nineteenth-century social evolutionary theory, which incorporated material culture patterns that had been developed by archaeologists, so-called neoevolutionary approaches by Julian Steward, Gordon Childe, Leslie White, and later writers derived their material correlates of social organization and change from comparative studies of ethnography, ethno-history, and history. These scholars viewed political complexity as the result of plant and animal domestication - food production increased available energy resources and permitted population growth, leading to rapid social and technological innovations culminating in processes of urbanization and the development of centralized states and empires. While Steward favored a multilineal evolutionary taxonomy for social evolution, Childe and White generally embraced an evolutionary scheme involving a limited number of rapid macroevolutionary transformations (‘revolutions’) separated by multilineal microevolutionary developments that followed specific culture-historical trajectories.
These processual orientations were more fully expressed in the 1960s by Elman Service, Morton Fried, and others, who promoted evolutionary taxonomies that articulated some important social features of complex societies: hereditary inequality, political offices, differential access to resources, political centralization and specialization, and the development oF supra-kin politico-legal systems (Figure 2). Service’s typology has remained influential among archaeologists, who have worked to identify material correlates of the societal transformations concomitant with the development and elaboration of political complexity.
Critics of neoevolutionary theory fault it for being teleological and static, fetishizing the state (or, worse, projecting the values of a contemporary nation-state onto the past), masking organizational diversity, and failing to account for the role of individual agency. While acknowledging the limitations of the archaeological record vis-ti-vis behavioral and cognitive aspects of social change, neoevolutionary archaeologists have advanced more dynamic approaches to social evolution (Figure 3). Evolutionary trajectories are not inevitable, and types should not be viewed as unidimensional or unidirectional; rather, in the tradition of Childe and White, social change may be viewed as a dynamic adaptive landscape (sensu Sewall Wright) where complexity is measured in terms of ecological fitness maxima that fluctuate through time (Figure 4). Classificatory systems describe a limited number of general patterns of institutional organization that were durable enough under given conditions to be materialized archaeologically - the results of macroevolutionary transformations of the sort termed ‘revolutionary’ by earlier researchers. Internally, broad categories subsume substantial microevolutionary variation - they encompass both diachronic fluctuations and inter-regional variability - but they can be useful for developing research hypotheses and for making comparative analyses of social institutions. Comparative ethnographic and ethno-historic studies reveal that while the material record may seem straightforward to archaeologists, human groups have pursued a wide range of organizational strategies. Neoevolutionists recognize the specific differences but they often want to focus on significant and repetitive patterns.
This article considers two macroevolutionary transformations linked to complex societies, looking first at the development of political offices and centralized regional political organizations (chiefdoms), and subsequently at the innovation of centralized and specialized civil government (states). In considering intra-type variation, the dynamics of large-scale multiethnic states (empires) are also considered.
World History
