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Archaeological research has by now revealed a great deal of variation in the way early complex societies, or chiefdoms, developed. This variation is widely recognized, but our understanding of the forces that produced it remains relatively undeveloped. This paper takes aim at such understanding by exploring variation in the local economies of six early chiefdoms; it considers what implications this variation had for trajectories of chiefdom development, as well as the source of that variation. Economic exchange is a primary form of local interaction in all societies. Because of distance-interaction principles, closer household spacing within local communities facilitated more frequent interaction and thus encouraged productive differentiation, economic interdependence, and the development of well-integrated local economies. Well-integrated local economies, in turn, provided ready opportunities for aspiring leaders to accumulate wealth and fund political economies, and pursuit of these opportunities led to societies with leaders whose power had a direct economic base. Wider household spacing, on the other hand, impeded interaction and the development of well-integrated local economies. In such contexts, aspiring leaders were able to turn to ritual and religion as a base of social power. Even when well-integrated local economies offered opportunities for wealth accumulation and a ready source of funding for political economies, these opportunities were not always taken advantage of. That variation in the shapes of early chiefdoms can be traced back to patterns of household spacing highlights the importance of settlement and interaction in explaining not just chiefdom development, but societal change more generally.

Analyses of house-size distributions in the Old and New World showed that wealth disparities increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale. Beneath headlines about booms and busts and other economic disturbance lies a deeper problem: wealth inequality. But what is its history, and what are the larger social factors that determine the disparate distribution of wealth? Timothy Kohler and colleagues look at the evolution of inequality worldwide since the Neolithic era, around 11,000 years ago, using house size as a proxy for calculating the Gini coefficient, a measure of wealth inequality. The study shows that, as may be expected, wealth inequality has generally increased. Unexpectedly however, inequality increased far more in the Old World of Europe and Asia than in the New (North and Central America). Even in highly urban New World sites, house sizes are generally similar. There are no enormous palaces, which one expects in Old World urban contexts. The authors suggest that the inherent wealth provided by large domesticated animals could explain the imbalance. Horses, for example, allowed people to ride around acquiring wealth from others. How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility1,2. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records3,4, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods5,6 or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages7, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale8. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification9, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans10,11. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study.

The complex of Niuheliang, in north-eastern China, with its concentration of ceremonial architecture and unusual art, has been considered the most highly developed polity of the Hongshan period, representing the integration of a large territory. In contrast, the supposed absence of residential remains has been advanced to suggest that it was a vacant ceremonial centre. Systematic survey of the area is now helping to clarify relationships between ceremonial sites and occupation patterns. Densities of utilitarian pottery sherds were used to map settlement and estimate population levels in relation to the locations of ceremonial architecture and concentrations of ritual pottery. This reveals that despite unproductive soils, the area had a relatively high, although scattered, population, focused in part on ritual locations. The results support a role for Niuheliang as a place of pilgrimage, but within a nexus of settled communities that sustained its ceremonial activities.

Household refuse is ideally suited for the comparative study of social and economic inequality. Compositional variation revealed by nonmetric multidimensional scaling of artifact assemblage data from multiple households is readily interpreted as evidence for qualitative differences in social prestige, wealth, and productive activities. Different configurations of these variables reflect differences in social structure and the underlying bases of inequality between communities. Comparing the average of the Euclidean distances from which each scaling was produced provides a direct and quantitative means of assessing differences in the magnitude of assemblage differences interpreted as social inequality between cases. Gini indices calculated from the same household artifact assemblage data provide a similarly direct and quantitative means of measuring differences in wealth inequality between communities. In this paper, household artifact assemblage data from three Neolithic settlements in three different are...

Much of the literature on the role played by environment in complex society development focuses on temporal correspondence between climate change and human social change. Many such studies fall into a series of traps: the unwarranted assumption that correlation equals causation; failure to evaluate the statistical significance of the association; simplistic characterization of climate change's human impact or of the nature of human social change itself; and focusing on a spatial scale too large to intersect with the human decision-making processes where social change begins. Here we compare decisions made about buffering agricultural risk by Neolithic farmers in two regions of northern China. Hongshan farmers in the Western Liao Valley chose to cope with agricultural risk at the individual household level and lived in scattered farmsteads and dispersed villages, while Yangshao farmers in the Central Plains chose cooperation and interdependence between households living in large compact villages. These decisions were clearly rooted in the particular environmental conditions of the two regions and had far-reaching and unanticipated consequences for the two long-term trajectories of complex society development. The forces that shaped the trajectories of the Western Liao and the Central Plains differently fit a pattern that is global in scope. Examining the decisions made by Neolithic farmers in response to an essentially static feature of their environments contributes more to our understanding of the dynamics of long-term human social change (and the environment's role in it) than attempting to correlate social changes to particular climate changes.

The Early Yangshao period (5000–4000 BC) village of Jiangzhai is the most completely excavated and reported of any early agricultural community in the middle reaches of northern China’s Yellow River Valley. This comprehensive dataset can better our understanding of early agricultural village societies and complex society development, especially the emergence of economic inequality. Analyses of Jiangzhai’s architectural remains and their arrangement; estimates of household population, storage capacity, and animal consumption; and analyses of household artifact assemblages are used to reconstruct the social and economic organization of this important Neolithic settlement. Our analyses suggest that differences in economic organization at the household level are responsible for patterns of intra-settlement economic differentiation previously attributed to higher-order “corporate” institutions. Rather than a segmental society composed of redundant homologous units, Jiangzhai displays substantial variability among residential sectors and constituent households in terms of activity emphases and surplus accumulation. Substantial intrasite variation in socioeconomic organization has previously been thought characteristic only of more complex Late Neolithic societies in the middle Yellow River Valley region.

Nature 551, 619–622 (2017); doi:10.1038/nature24646 In this Letter, the following paragraph was inadvertently omitted from the Methods section: ‘Gini coefficients for Tikal (Classic Maya) and Kahun (Middle Kingdom Egypt) were calculated from data compiled from site maps by the project ‘Service Access in Premodern Cities’ (http://cities.wikispaces.asu.edu/).

The Hongshan societies of northeastern China are among East Asia’s earliest complex societies. They have been known largely from elaborate burials with carved jades in ceremonial platforms. The most monumental remains are concentrated in a “core zone” in western Liaoning province. Residential remains are less well known and most investigations of them have been in peripheral regions outside the core zone. Recent regional settlement pattern research around the well known ceremonial site of Dongshanzui has begun to document the communities that built and used Hongshan core zone monuments and to assess their developmental dynamics. The core zone, like the Hongshan periphery, appears to have been organized into a series of small chiefly districts within which ceremonial activities were important integrative forces. Their estimated populations of less than 1,000 are not much larger than those of districts in the periphery, and the evidence does not suggest that these districts were integrated into any larger political entity. The greater elaboration of core zone monumental architecture is thus not attributable to demographically larger communities or to larger-scale political integration. Future research should focus on documenting the organization of statuses and economic activities within these core zone communities to assess potential differences from peripheral communities in these regards.

The study of developing complex societies can fruitfully focus on the human interactions that define communities, which have always been at the heart of settlement pattern research. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities of varying scales can actually be identified in archaeological survey data. Most often sites have simply been assumed to correspond to communities, although this practice has been criticized. Methods are offered to delineate communities at different scales systematically in survey data, and their implications for field data collection strategies are explored comparatively for cases from northeast China, Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes.

Rank-size analysis of settlement systems in archaeology has focused strongly on departures from log-normality, but it is not clear that a log-normal pattern should ordinarily be expected. Direct comparison of observed rank-size curves to each other is of greater utility in identifying chronological change and inter-regional variation in settlement dynamics as reflected in rank-size patterns. A coefficient of shape is proposed to facilitate comparison and to serve as a basis for bootstrap assessment of statistical confidence in any differences that are observed. The approach is illustrated with analysis of archaeological settlement data from China, Iran, Peru, and Mexico. These analyses provide insight into how many settlements must be observed to achieve high confidence and into the impact of curve shape on confidence.

Early complex society studies, like anthropology in general, are strongly rooted in comparative analysis. Cultural evolutionists of the mid-nineteenth century (Tylor 1865; Morgan 1877; Spencer 1880–97) relied entirely on comparative ethnography to create speculative accounts of the antecedents of contemporary societies. A century later, Sahlins (Sahlins and Service 1960), Service (1962), Fried (1967), and other scholars did the same without assuming that “savages” would naturally aspire to better things, and slowly work their way through “barbarism” toward the “civilized” condition of Victorian Britain. Value-neutral vocabulary was sought and forces driving social change were considered, but the entire comparative enterprise still depended on imagining that some contemporary societies were like the unknown ancestors of other more complex contemporary societies. There was virtually no direct information about human societies before those that could be observed in the ethnographic present or through historical sources. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, that situation has changed dramatically. It is no longer necessary to speculate about diachronic processes from synchronic snapshots of societies not historically related to each other, because of a flood of direct archaeological evidence about long-term trajectories of social change. We still do not know as much about the past of any region as we would like to, but we do now know more about many regions than we are fully able to make sense of. Comparative study is important to this task of, quite literally, making sense of abundant detailed information. It was exactly this that the early cultural evolutionists were doing with their comparative ethnography: making sense of a welter of ethnographic detail. Scholars from Morgan to Service and Fried offered understanding by placing ethnographically known contemporary societies in an imaginary developmental sequence. Since the sequence was based on nothing more than ethnographic information about contemporary ⁠unrelated societies, it is remarkable how much the cultural evolutionists got right about the past ten thousand years of human history.

Much recent archaeological literature has stressed the variety of forms that early non-egalitarian societies may take. This variety has been characterized as “horizontal” variation (Drennan 1996, Feinman 2000) in contrast to the “vertical” dimension of social ranking most emphasized in the traditional cultural evolutionary literature. Much of cultural evolutionary thinking has, of course, a strongly unilineal character, and refocusing on horizontal variation has enabled fuller recognition of the very multilineal character of the emergence of hierarchical societies.

The emergence of centralized supra-local communities followed a number of different pathways, and varied considerably in its pacing in different regions. The establishment of settled agricultural life often set the stage for the emergence of these larger scale and more complex societies by creating the larger, denser populations without which they could not have occurred. The variation observed in the degree and nature of centralization as well as the extremely long time lag between the onset of the Neolithic and the emergence of supra-local centralized communities in some regions, however, make it clear that regional demographic and political centralization is neither a unitary phenomenon nor an automatic consequence of the Neolithic demographic transition. Larger more centralized communities do, nonetheless, owe specific debts to initial Neolithic processes in their regions, since central aspects of their distinctive regional characters are already present in the earliest sedentary agricultural villages that precede them. At least some of these characteristics were quite possibly inherited, in turn, from even earlier hunting and gathering bands.

Comparative study of early complex societies (chiefdoms) conjures visions of a cultural evolutionary emphasis on similarities and societal typology. Variation within the group has not been as systematically examined but offers an even more productive avenue of approach to fundamental principles of organization and change. Three widely separated trajectories of early chiefdom development are compared here: the Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico), the Alto Magdalena (Colombia), and Northeast China. Archaeological data from all three regions are analyzed with the same tools to reveal variation in human activities, relationships, and interactions as these change in the emergence of chiefly communities. Patterning in this variation suggests the operation of underlying general principles, which are offered as hypotheses that merit further investigation and evaluation in comparative study of a much larger number of cases.

Analysis of a large sample of household artifact assemblages from residential zones dating to the Hongshan period (4500–3000 BCE) in northeastern China complements regional-scale settlement study and excavation of house structures, platforms, and tombs. Prestige differentiation between household units is recognizable but modest. Productive differentiation is also present, indicating a very small degree of economic interdependence between households involving the utilitarian goods of daily life. Exchange did transcend both local and regional-scale communities, but movement of goods seldom exceeded a few kilometers. Standards of living were similar across households, with no sign of wealth differentiation. Confirming what has previously been suggested about the role of belief systems in Hongshan social integration, the strongest differentiation detectable in the household evidence involved religious roles and ritual activities. The elaboration of ceremonial architecture and funerary ritual of the Hongshan core zone is thus seen not to correspond to larger regional-scale communities, greater projection of political power, a more specialized economy, larger-scale exchange of goods, or accumulation of wealth. These commonly imagined aspects of early complex society were strikingly underdeveloped in Hongshan society, given its complex ceremonial architecture, elaborate burial treatment of presumed ritual specialists, and famous jade carvings.