Archaic States presents the results of a seminar held at the School for American Research in
1992. Unlike most previously edited volumes on early states, which have focused primarily�…

FEINMAN, GARY M. & JOYCE MARCUS (eds). Archaic states (Sch. am. Res. adv. Scm.
Ser.). xiv, 427 pp., illus., maps, tables, bibliogr. Santa Fe: School of American Research�…

One of the favorite pastimes of social scientists over the course of the past century has been
to theorize about the evolution of the world's great" civilizations." These grand and glorious�…

▪ Abstract The earliest states developed in the central Andean highlands and along the
central Pacific coast of western South America. The consensus in the archaeological�…

The Evolution of Political Systems seeks to understand the sociopolitics of small-scale
sedentary societies. The book contains 10 well-written and challenging papers that�…

An introduction by Ronald Cohen fails to make clear why these essays were combined to
make a book. Several are originals but two were published previously (Eva and Robert�…

In this selection, the anthropologist Marvin Harris traces the emergence of state-level
societies from the big-man systems and chiefdoms of earlier times. Harris concentrates on�…

The evolution of the state has long been a major focus of investigation in anthropology.
Cultural anthropologists have looked at recent societies and tried to reconstruct the�…

Despite the abundance of material, there have been few systematic works on comparative
political systems of primitive societies. In the available literature, two main approaches can�…

The history of generalizing studies of early states and their origins goes back to the
development of theories of social evolution in the eighteenth century. These assumed that it�…