Evolution of Social Complexity

The volume represents an attempt of a complex study of the politogenetic processes in their regional and temporary variety. The authors hope that their survey can and should also promote a better understanding of the general tendencies and mechanisms of cultural and sociopolitical evolution, of the interrelation and interaction of cultural, social, and political formats in the human society. The authors believe that the use of principles and methods of the civilizational approach in politogenetic studies, on the one hand, and the inclusion of the politogenesis into the problem area of civilizations studies, on the other hand, creates the effect of novelty in terms of both anthropology and civilizations studies, enriches their scientific toolkit and expands heuristic limits.

This paper attempts a general assessment of the contributions included in this volume. We examine three main kinds of problems related to the research on social inequality in Iberian Late Prehistory. These are theoretical, empirical and interpretative. Among the first, we comment upon the very definition of social inequality, the taxonomical categories employed in social evolution, as well as the main factors causing inequality, with special attention to labour force mobilisation. Among the second, we highlight some weaknesses of the Iberian archaeological record for the investigation of the subject matter, such as the limitations of the absolute chronology or the settlement record. Finally, we discuss the propositions that have been put forward to understand the forms that social inequality took among Neolithic, Copper and Bronze Age communities, concluding that Iberian archaeologists would much benefit from a comparative perspective.

The authors of this article depart from the idea that certain alternatives of development can be distinguished for every level of social evolution complexity. Different social and political forms have co-existed, competed with each other for a long time, and for some specific ecological and social niches non-general (in the retrospect) lines, models and variants could turn out more competitive and adequate than those that became dominant later. Hence as a rule, the argument about any inevitable outcome of evolution is true only in the most general respect (and only if certain conditions are observed): as an outcome of long-lasting competition between different forms, their disappearance, transformations, social selection, adaptation to various ecological conditions and so forth, while such an outcome could be not inevitable for each and every society in particular.

"Issues of formation and evolution of the early (archaic) state continue to remain among those problems which have not found their generally accepted solutions yet. Contributors to The Early State , Its Alternatives and Analogues represent both traditional and non-traditional points of view on the evolution of statehood. However, the data presented in the volume seem to demonstrate in a fairly convincing manner a great diversity of pathways to statehood, as well as non-universality of transformation into states of complex and even supercomplex societies. The diversity of sociopolitical forms, non-unilinearity of social evolution, presence of alternatives / analogues of the early state and complexity of state formation process far exceeding the ones indicated by conventional evolutionist schemes can be regarded as general ideas going through most contributions to the volume.


Contents


Introduction


Part I: Theory

1 Alternatives of Social Evolution ………………………………… 3

Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Leonid E. Grinin, and Andrey V. Korotayev

2 Was the Chiefdom a Congelation of Ideas? …………………… 28

Robert L. Carneiro

3 Beyond States and Empires: Chiefdoms and Informal Politics 46

Patrick Chabal, Gary Feinman, and Peter Skalnik

4 Alternative Models of Middle Range Society.

‘Individualistic' Asia vs . ‘Collectivistic' America ? …………… 61

Yuri E. Berezkin

5 Was the State Inevitable? ………………………………………… 72

Henri J. M. Claessen

6 The Early State and Its Analogues: A Comparative Analysis 88

Leonid E. Grinin


Part II: Early States

7 Early Dynastic Egypt : A Socio-Environmental/Anthropological

Hypothesis of ‘Unification' ………………………………………. 139

Dmitri B. Proussakov

8 The Ruler as Possessor of Power in Sumer …………………….. 181

Vladimir V. Emelianov

9 Ritual and Rationality:

Religious Roots of the Bureaucratic State in Ancient China 196

Richard Baum

10 Conquest Warfare, Strategies of Resistance, and the Rise

of the Zapotec Early State ……………………………………… 220

Charles S. Spencer and Elsa M. Redmond

11 The Pristine Myth of the Pristine State in America ……………. 262

Richard P. Schaedel and David G. Robinson

12 The Transition to Statehood in Central Europe ………………. 278

Ludomir R. Lozny

13 Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin …… 288

Eleonora S. L'vova


Part III: Sedentary Alternatives and Analogues

14 The Chiefdom: Precursor of the Tribe? (Some Trends of Political

Evolution in North-East Yemeni Highlands) …………………… 300

Andrey V. Korotayev

15 From Local Communities to Megacommunity: Biniland

in the 1 st Millennium B.C.–19 th Century A.D. ………………… 325

Dmitri M. Bondarenko

16 Greece : The Stateless Polis (11 th – 4 th С enturies B.C.) …………. 364

Moshe Berent

17 Rome : Socio-political Evolution in the 8 th – 2 nd Centuries B.C. 388

Dmitri V. Dozhdev

18 Early State and Democra с y ……………………………………… 419

Leonid E. Grinin


Part IV. Nomadic Alternatives and Analogues

19 Cultural Capital, Livestock Raiding, and the Military Advantage

of Traditional Pastoralists ……………………………………… 466

William Irons

20 Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in Historical Retrospective 476

Anatoly M. Khazanov

21 Nomadic Empires in Evolutionary Perspective ………………… 501

Nikolay N. Kradin

22 Mongolian Nomadic Society of the Empire Period …………… 525

Tatyana D. Skrynnikova"

"PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
(Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011)

The notion of evolution is not popular in contemporary Anthropology. Many researchers do not use it preferring to write about transformation,
transit, or change. Evolution for them is synonymous to dogmatic understanding of human history (Yoffee 2005; Pauketat 2008). However,
even critics of evolutionism do not appear to reject= the very fact of continuous social change. In prehistory people were hunters and gatherers and were integrated in small bands. Later some of them experienced sedentarization and transition to food production, began to found towns and invent complex tools. It would be ridiculous to reject such changes. Another point is that contemporary vision of cultural transformations differs greatly from the naïve ideas of the 19th century evolutionists (see, e.g., Earle 2002; Claessen 2000; Carneiro 2003, Marcus 2008; Hanks, Linduff 2009; Earle, Kristiansen 2010 etc.). Contemporary approaches are more flexible and are based on a much more considerable set of evidence. That is why it would be wrong to criticize the scholars of the past for their knowledge of something worse than ours. They ought to be estimated in comparison with their contemporaries. So, we believe that the notion of evolution has a right to exist, and for already several decades we have been elaborating the ideas that can be called “new wave evolutionism”, or multievolutionism (non-linear evolution theory).
The first edition of the present volume was published over ten years ago, in 2000, in two languages, English and Russian (under the Альтернативные пути к цивилизации [Alternative pathways to the civilization] title given by the publisher for commercial reasons). It was the response of the then young generation of post-Soviet anthropologists in league with prominent Western and Russian scholars to dogmatic Marxist interpretations of older, Soviet ethnologists and archaeologists (see also Korotayev, Chubarov 1991; Kradin, Lynsha 1995). Several other collective edited volumes (Bondarenko, Korotayev 2000; Kradin, Bondarenko, Barfield 2003; Grinin et al 2004; Bondarenko, Nemirovsky 2007; Grinin, Beliaev, Korotayev 2008 etc.), monographs (Korotayev 1995; 1996; 2003; Bondarenko 2001; 2006; Korotayev et al 2006; Kradin, Skrynnikova 2006; Grinin 2007; Kradin 2007; 2010; Grinin, Korotayev 2009) and journal articles (Beliaev, Bondarenko, Korotayev 2001; Kradin 2002; Bondarenko, Korotayev 2003; Bondarenko 2007a; 2007b) have appeared since then. Five “Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations” international conferences held in Moscow and St. Petersburg between 2000 and 2009 turned out very important for elaboration of the non-linear sociocultural evolution theory. The Social Evolution & History English-language journal published in Russia since 2002 has become a venue for discussion of the non-linear evolution theory, ideas and evidence related to it. In particular, besides an impressive number of separate articles, the following special issues and sections, among others, have been published in it: Exploring the Horizons of Big History (2005, Vol. 4, No 1), Thirty Years of Early State Research (2008, Vol. 7, No1), The Early State in Anthropological Theory (2009, Vol. 8, No 1), Analyses of Cultural Evolution (2009, Vol. 8, No 2), Urbanization, Regional Diversity and the Problem of State Formation in Europe (2010, Vol. 9, No 2). One more discussion, Chiefdoms in the process of social evolution: theory, problems and comparative studies, is to appear in
the Journal soon (was published in 2011 as Vol.10, Iss. 1. - D.B.).
Alternatives of Social Evolution consists of five parts. The first part includes theoretical studies of non-linear evolution. Articles on the alternative pathways of the prehistoric societies’ evolution form the volume’s second part. The evolutionary pathways of complex societies and state origins are the topics of the volume’s third and forth parts. The closing part is devoted to nomadic societies. We hope that the book has not lost its relevance and will remain in demand by readers."

This yearbook is the fourth in the series with the title Globalistics and Globalization Studies. The subtitle of the present volume is Global History & Big History. The point is that today our global world really demands global knowledge. Thus, there are a few actively developing
multidisciplinary approaches and integral disciplines among which one can name Global Studies, Global History and Big History. They all provide a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History with its vast and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompasses all the forms of existence and all timescales and brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and the humanities. Global History is transnational or world history
which examines history from a global perspective, making a wide use of comparative history and
of the history of multiple cultures and nations. Global Studies express the view of systemic
and epistemological unity of global processes. Thus, one may argue that Global Studies and
Globalistics can well be combined with Global History and Big History and such a multidisciplinary
approach can open wide horizons for the modern university education as it helps to
form a global view of various processes.

As a raw material, ivory has been used to manufacture a wide range of objects, normally associated with sumptuous material culture. In this article we explore the role played by ivory and ivory artefacts among early complex societies, and particularly its importance in the definition of identities among emergent elites. To this end, we make a thorough examination of the evidence from Copper Age Iberia, focusing on the mega-site of Valencina, in southern Spain. This site has provided what to date is the largest assemblage of prehistoric ivory in western Europe, with an estimated total of 8.8 kg, including finely crafted artefacts of unrivalled beauty and sophistication. Our study looks carefully at the technological, morphological and contextual dimensions of Copper Age ivory. As a result, we contend that the broad morphological variability together with the technological uniformity of this assemblage suggest that, while belonging to a common technological tradition, objects were deliberately crafted as unique and unrepeatable so that they could be used to create and maintain socio-cultural idiosyncrasies and ideological legitimation.

This volume is the product of a one day session organised  within the IVth Congresso de Arqueología Peninsular, held in Faro (Portugal) between 14th-19th September 2004. The aim of this session was to discuss the subject matter of prehistoric social inequality, a topic that had never before been examined in an Iberian archaeology conference. The time span covered by this book is Late Prehistory, between the second half of the 6th and the beginning of the 1st millennia cal BC (Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age). From a thematic viewpoint, this volume discusses a wide series of issues, including theory (like for example, applicability of social evolution taxonomies, centre-periphery relationships, or the sets of factors causing inequalities), empirical evidence (critical assessment of the validity of systems of empirical indicators, testing of hypothesis, quality of the available data), as well as interpretation (comparative inter-regional and diachronic analyses of the economic, social and ideological process involved in social inequality).

In the book where he coined the term "Axial Age", Karl Jaspers noted that human history included both "tranquil ages" and "ages of change". This paper begins with the observation that this oscillation between stable and transformational periods encapsulates the pattern in complexity theory by which systems oscillate between relatively long "stable states" and shorter "phase transitions". Applying this pattern, the coauthors speculate that human history has undergone three such "axial" phase transitions-the Neolithic Revolution, the Axial Age, and Modernity. During each of these periods, the older dominant social structures proved inadequate, as populations grew, new technologies appeared, and new social conflicts became more intense. To meet these challenges, people in the societies where these transformations occurred became more innovative, exploring new ways to use recently developed technologies and introducing a variety of social experiments. By the end of these ages of change, new social structures would become dominant across Eurasia. Today, Modernity, as the third axial age, seems to be coming to an end, making this pattern a valuable tool for understanding our world.

The global economy is unsustainable because it promotes constant growth on a finite planet. Driving the
expansionist economy is an unsustainable consumer culture. Because technological advances cannot solve
social problems, within a few decades increasing resource shortages and degrading ecosystems will collapse
the world system.
Sustainability requires social and environmental resilience, health and wholeness. A consumer society
cannot transform into a conserver society without cultural and structural change. The key factor for transformation
is the emergence of an integral worldview capable of organizing sustainable social structures and economic
processes.