ABSTRACT
Archaeological settlement patterns afford particularly accessible and regionally comprehensive avenues for the interpretation of societal change. Most political reconstructions derived from preor proto-historic settlement patterns infer the political status of whole societies. This macroscopic approach is exemplified by the definition of ‘states’ as societies characterized by centralized political control, and which are manifested by demonstrably hierarchical settlement systems (following Wright and Johnson 1975; Wright 1986). According to the same logic, ‘pre-state’ societies, often subsumed under the terms ‘chiefdom’ or ‘complex chiefdom’, are conceptualized as antecedent societal forms that lack some aspects of centralized political control, and are reflected by less hierarchical settlement patterns (e.g. Earle 1987, 1991; Wright 1984). Even when heeding calls for conceptual flexibility (cf. Rothman 1994), this macroscopic approach implicitly assumes a linear evolutionary progression from chiefdom to state (following Carneiro 1981; but see critique in Yoffee 1993), often engendering correspondingly constrained, linear interpretations of prehistoric social development.
