ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some reflections on the uses of “complexity” as an analytical concept. The celebratory stance has been, in large part, the result of decades of studies of the damage wrought by reduction and simplification. In the introduction to their edited volume, Complexities, Annemarie Mol and John Law draw attention to a variety of critiques of simplification within the social sciences and humanities. The rejection of evolutionism by Boas and his students in the early twentieth century is by now a well-documented chapter in the history of anthropology. Concern with “complexity” and “complex societies” continued to be pronounced in the new processual archaeology of the 1960s, addressed through the explicit importation of the language of systems theory into archaeology. Price’s general argument is that sedentary habitations and “more complex cultural manifestations” developed in the Upper Pleistocence among some hunter-gatherers.
