Excerpt

The origins of complex societies—those with hierarchically organized political systems, specialized divisions of labor, and relatively unequal distributions of power and wealth—fascinate us. These societies tend to be politically and socially integrated at very large scales, encompassing tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of individuals. They are the societies in which most of us live.

It hasn’t always been this way. For 92 to 98 percent of the existence of modern Homo sapiens, it appears that most people lived in relatively small-scale, egalitarian societies, with muted differences in wealth, status, and political power (Boehm 2001; Smith et al. 2010). What happened? Why did it happen? These are longstanding questions, ones that this chapter attempts to address in a systematic and novel way.

Every state that exists today is a cultural successor to the earliest states that arose during the Middle Holocene. Each of these states grew on an economic foundation of intensive agriculture cultivated on well-watered, fertile land (Trigger 2003). Agriculturalists, however, are not the only societies to manifest political complexity and inequality.

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