Feast, Famine or Fighting Multiple Pathways to Social Complexity [Paperback]

The advent of social complexity has been a longstanding debate among social scientists. Existing theories and approaches involving the origins of social complexity include environmental circumscription, population growth, technology transfers, prestige-based and interpersonal-group competition, organized conflict, perennial wartime leadership, wealth finance, opportunistic leadership, climatological change, transport and trade monopolies, resource circumscription, surplus and redistribution, ideological imperialism, and the consideration of individual agency.

However, recent approaches such as the inclusion of bioarchaeological perspectives, prospection methods, systematically-investigated archaeological sites along with emerging technologies are necessarily transforming our understanding of socio-cultural evolutionary processes. In short, many pre-existing ways of explaining the origins and development of social complexity are being reassessed. 

Ultimately, the contributors to this edited volume challenge the status quo regarding how and why social complexity arose by providing revolutionary new understandings of social inequality and socio-political evolution.

Chapter 1:.- Introduction.- Chapter 2: Violence, Warriors, and Rock Art in Bronze Age Scandinavia.- Chapter 3: Societal Dynamics of Prestate Societies of the North Central European Plains, 600-900 CE.- Chapter 4: Trade and State Formation in Ancient East African Coast and Southern Zambezia.- Chapter 5: Feasting, Social Complexity and the Emergence of the Early Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia: A View from G?bekli Tepe.- Chapter 6: Highly Stratified Societies without Permanent Leadership: Yi in Liangshan of Southwestern China.- Chapter 7: Coercive Power and State Formation in Northern Vietnam.- Chapter 8: The Emergence of Sociopolitical Complexity: Evilc.