ABSTRACT
Along with the origins of agriculture, the appearance of complex societies—often called chiefdoms and states—is one of the most widely discussed social processes in the archaeological literature. Explanations for the beginnings of complex societies commonly involve ideas of progressive social evolution that can be traced back to eighteenth-century social philosophy of the Enlightenment. Initially propounded in the social sciences by Spencer (1857), Tylor (1865), and Morgan (1877), and employed by early Marxist social theory (Engels 1972 [1884]), similar progressivist concepts can be found in popular neoevolutionary models of Fried (1967) and Service (1962) as well as in the work of Childe (1936). Despite the many distinct theoretical perspectives that have been applied subsequently to the rise of social complexity (Damgaard Andersen et al. 1997; Nichols and Charlton 1997; Feinman and Marcus 1998; Kristiansen and Rowlands 1998; Cowgill 2004; Yoffee 2005; Johnson and Earle 2000; Lull and Micó 2007), they share with progressivist theory an underlying framework that societies inherently change with time, social universals can be observed in these changes, and social change is usually vectored from simple to complex (Rosenswig 2000: 4).
