Feast, Famine or Fighting?

The advent of social complexity has been a longstanding debate among social scientists.Existing theories and approaches involving the origins of social complexity includeenvironmental circumscription, population growth, technology transfers, prestige-based and interpersonal-group competition, organized conflict, perennial wartimeleadership, wealth finance, opportunistic leadership, climatological change, transportand trade monopolies, resource circumscription, surplus and redistribution, ideologicalimperialism, and the consideration of individual agency. However, recent approaches such as the inclusion of bioarchaeological perspectives,prospection methods, systematically-investigated archaeological sites along withemerging technologies are necessarily transforming our understanding of socio-cultural evolutionary processes. In short, many pre-existing ways of explaining theorigins and development of social complexity are being reassessed. Ultimately, the contributors to this edited volume challenge the status quo regardinghow and why social complexity arose by providing revolutionary new understandingsof social inequality and socio-political evolution.