ABSTRACT
In recent years there have been signs, among archaeologists studying the development of social complexity, of increasing dissatisfaction with the evolutionary theories of the Anglo-American ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s and 1970s as full explanations. Much has been learnt from this phase of archaeological enquiry. The focusing of attention on a society’s relationship to its environment, on the complicated interrelationships of internal factors such as subsistence economy, exchange, technology and population, and on the potential for small-scale change in one area to initiate major restructuring of the whole social system, has been most fruitful. Attempts to use the concepts of chiefdom and state have led not only to discussion of the applicability of such terms in prehistoric contexts, but also to debate about the proper identification of such social concepts, or indeed other concepts of complexity with material correlates in the archaeological record. Above all there has been the recognition of the very wide range of forms of social organization which is largely masked by lumping them into such grossly oversimplified categories as chiefdom and state. Because of the evident success of this conceptual framework in stimulating archaeological enquiry, its shortcomings have also become increasingly obvious. There has been a reliance on functionalist and adaptationist explanations, and an obsession with the adaptively successful reorganizations which enable societies to incorporate ever larger quantities of territory, population or energy. There has been a tendency to adopt a stadial approach within a theory of unilinear social evolution which can frequently descend into sterile debate about the correct attribution of a particular social formation to one category or another, or the search for process to transform social formation from one stage to the next. Finally, there has been an excessively abstract modelling of social factors which pays little attention to the realities of social relations in historical societies. The rich diversity of forms taken by societies with complex organization is given scant attention in the search for generalized evolutionary models.
