Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, 345360 (2001) doi:10.1006/jaar.2000.0377, available online at http:/ /www.idealibrary.

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Complexity in Archaic States

Robert McC. Adams
Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0532 Received July 25, 2000; revision received October 6, 2000; accepted October 26, 2000; published online June 1, 2001 The concept of complexity, associated particularly with ancient cities, states, and civilizations and their immediate antecedents, denotes qualities of hierarchical differentiation and the intricacy and interdependency of their parts and relationships. Alike in the human and natural worlds, complexity has repeatedly emerged as an overarching characterization through irregular, discontinuous processes of accumulation. These led by degrees and at intervals to relatively abrupt, qualitative changes. Under various constraints, contemporary archaeological research methods and objectives have not been accompanied by an adequate recognition of the centrality of increasing complexity as a social evolutionary tendency. Here it is argued that a focused, highly interdisciplinary study of complex adaptive systems is meanwhile coming to the fore that deserves careful archaeological scrutiny. A growing convergence of interests is suggested by shared issues like historical path-dependency, the interactions of differently situated and motivated human agents, differential returns to scale, and the range of possible, computer-generated outcomes of unpredictable combinations of orderly, random and stochastic processes and events. 2001 Academic Press

Two interrelated trends, toward increasing hierarchical differentiation and toward complexity, have characterized human social evolution since the end of the Pleistocene. Yet it is obvious that individual societies have seldom if ever long sustained a movement in either direction, let alone both. As with its biological and ecosystemic evolutionary analogues, discontinuities are an essential part of the cultural evolutionary process. Making a case for comparable processes affecting social systems and ecosystems, with little more than a straightforward translation of the entities involved, Holling et al. generalize that in all dynamic, self-organized systems,
change is neither continuous and gradual nor consistently chaotic. Rather it is episodic, with periods of slow accumulation of natural capital such as biomass or nutrients, punctuated by sudden releases and reorganization of that capital as the result of internal or external natural processes or of human-imposed catastrophes. (n.d.: 2.4)

Discontinuous, rapid shifts, interspersed by much longer spans of relative stability,

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exist in most archaeological sequences of regional or larger scale. Such irregularities provide the framework for most archaeological theory and synthesis, employing the longue dure outlook with which Fernand Braudel has enriched the study of history and secondarily also of archaeology (Bintliff, Ed. 1991). Drawing on the example of the Industrial Revolution, archaeologists under the stimulus of Gordon Childe and Julian Steward were already beginning to take notice of complex, multicausal irregularities in rate and direction by around the time of World War II (Greene 1999). Numerous efforts quickly began to center, as they remain centered today, on the multiple, independently occurring examples of early food-producing and urban revolutions in both hemispheres. The study of hierarchical differentiation has been deeply rooted in the social sciences since the last century. Complexity, on the other hand, has a more vaguely inclusive, but also more obscure, lineage and

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present set of meanings. Basically, it conveys a sense of intricacy in nature, structure, and perhaps causation. The Oxford English Dictionary nds the root of the word in a whole that comprehends a number of interrelated parts or involved particulars. In archaeological usage complexity most frequently implies pronounced and institutionalized patterns of inequality and heterogeneity (Smith 1993:56). Omitting rare reference even to groups of hunter-gatherers, its prevailing application is sometimes to chiefdoms but more especially to ancient cities, states, and civilizations. Early Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, North China, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America, differing greatly from one another in numerous other respects, stand apart as the essentially complete roster of the original or pristine members of this latter class. An abstraction like complexity does not emerge immediately from raw archaeological data. It grows by trial and error, through analysis of many discrete settings and through iterative testing with successively improving methods. Levels of inequality in status, wealth, and power come to light in tomb furnishings, in discontinuous classes of settlement size, domestic architecture, and monumental construction, and in localized concentrations of costly or exotic materials from distant locales. But doubts linger about how closely gradations of control over human and other resources corresponded with these material vestiges that survive to be detected and measured millennia later. Measures of heterogeneity, similarly, are in the end always somewhat speculative. Reconstructions of relationships, connectivities, and individual differentiation or autonomy require acts of creation, not deduction, from limited and ambiguous material residues (Smith 1994:143144). Ancient texts, where they are available, can play a vital part in helping us to identify distribu-

tional patterns as signposts of organizations and institutions. But drawing signicant generalizations from ancient texts faces obstacles not less difcult than those confronting archaeologists. Long preoccupied with the intellectual resonances and aesthetic appeal of the qualities identied with cities and especially civilizations, humanistically inclined archaeologists have tended to concern themselves with the uniqueness of each member of the pristine class as a cultural achievement, rather than with the common, unifying characteristics that distinguish the class as a whole. Anthropological archaeologists, with a deeper commitment to the study of cultural evolution at large, are less accepting of this apparent unwillingness to seek out the general behind a mass of particulars. Seeking to avoid what can become an endlessly elaborated, descriptive cul de sac, most archaeologists trained in the outlook of the social sciences today probably think not in terms of civilizations but of early states deriving from antecedent chiefdoms. States are viewed as the decisive common feature in all of the nuclear areas of civilizations emergence, the primary engine behind a larger, dependent set of changes. The overall pace of research continues to grow and diversify ever more rapidly. That alone, however, cannot account for the proliferation of vigorous new theoretical and methodological advances. My own surmise is that most of these derive from external sourcesthe importation of natural science instrumentation, techniques, and perspectives on the one hand, and insights and models drawn from all across the social sciences on the other. But the assimilating and interpreting of impressively accumulating masses of new data is still primarily directed toward improving the understanding of particular cases. Receiving much less attention are synthetic and cross-cultural approaches to an understanding of processes commonly involved in the growth of early states.

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Part, but not all, of the explanation for the failure of the theoretical dimensions of the subject to keep pace is provided by limitations of archaeological methodologies and data. Scientic excavation, coupled with the exacting analytical and publication standards required if excavation results are to advance the discipline and justify the destructiveness of the discovery process, is exceedingly time-consuming and expensive. While larger than ever today, the supply of trained archaeologists and the many different kinds of resources they need has always been comparatively modest. In relation to the vastness of the remains of ancient civilizations that are already known (quite apart from what is yet to be discovered), it can safely be asserted that in all of the pristine areas only a minute fraction have as yet entered into the corpus of primary, usable archaeological knowledge. With so little known, the difculties associated with limitations or biases of existing samples are very large. Remains of monumental buildings and other likely repositories of artistic, textual, and similar treasures (by contemporary exhibition criteria) have naturally attracted disproportionate attention. Certain categories of voluminous and well-preserved material like ceramics, having the additional importance of being sensitive chronological indicators, almost always are carefully studied. But even for ceramics the determination and publication of full ranges of variability rather than subjectively selected types is rare. Most textual as well as art-historical sources that are archaeologically recovered encounter not only these limitations but others as well. Early writing systems, still in the process of emergence, were distinctly limited in the range of information they could convey. And rich as they presently became in anecdotal detail of the dynasties, wars, and religions genre, the textual corpora originating in early states and civilizations focus fairly narrowly on the views

and activities of elites. As such, they tell us disappointingly little about wider societal, let alone ecological, processes and settings. Then there is a further difculty. Conscious of where the greater weight of evidence is ordinarily to be found, most archaeologists choose to concentrate on well-represented periods of extensive building activity, assured stability, and centralized control. An emphasis on functional accounts and explanations, focusing on implicitly durable institutions and systemmaintaining properties, is a natural outcome. Treated as of lesser importance, or even as falling outside the framework of scientic analysis altogether, are the more ill-documented, chaotic episodes of hostile incursions and internal disruption. Yet in terms of gross proportions of the life spans of the societies in question, these conditions were almost always the largest part of the record. The imprecision of most archaeological dating has a similar effect. Permitting age determinations only with fairly large margins of uncertainty, it frequently does little to clarify the character or directionality of cultural relationships. Sudden or shortterm processes of change go unrecognized. Yet it is likely that they were often decisive turning points. In large part, therefore, archaeological reconstructions of process tend to be limited to selected, unrealistically smoothed, gradualistic aggregates. Living continuously with insecure approximations of dates, archaeologists risk not giving adequate consideration to some of the more subtle losses of processual understanding that result. Within compact settlements, careful stratigraphic analysis of living oors has a reasonable chance of establishing continuity and contemporaneity of habitation in adjacent residential units. Whenever buildings are relatively more dispersed, however, this rapidly becomes more difcult to demonstrate. Where natural conditions of soil, precipitation, or drainage could not support large areas of

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densely built-up settlement, this means that attempts to determine the number of simultaneously occupied dwelling units depends largely on typological analysis of pottery and other artifacts. Such attempts cannot escape considerable imprecision. Consequently, so do all population estimates and related attempts to assess the agricultural productivity presupposed by those estimates. What can be done to reinforce archaeologys chronological foundations against these problems? There is gratifying but fairly slow progress in extending the availability of dendrochronological and paleomagnetic dates. A more quickly and widely applicable step involves simply making increasing numbers of radiocarbon determinations on carefully chosen and collected samples. It has been shown that sophisticated handling of large, disparate assemblages of such determinations can impressively reduce uncertainties (Wright n.d.). In any case, there needs to be greater awareness of the interpretational opportunities that will continue to be foregone unless greater resources are devoted to what may seem mere chronological renements. INTERRELATED LIMITATIONS OF DATA, METHOD, AND THEORY Mesoamerica, and more especially the lowland Maya area, provides a brief illustration of how all these difculties intersect with one another to limit the theoretical as well as substantive progress of the eld. Common cultural traditions, integrative institutions, and the coercive powers of rulership are likely to have tied the clustered temples and palaces of monumental ceremonial centers to outlying hinterlands of much smaller, more diffuse settlements. But the degree of cohesiveness of regions around centers remains elusive. Smaller, outlying replications of some monumental building types may, indeed, imply a close, pan-community integration

of belief systems and/or a high level of hierarchical control. But it also may imply, as some Mayanists continue to argue, not a contemporaneous phenomenon at all but an occupation of the peripheries of the great centers largely subsequent to an abandonment of the cores. This is the kind of argument that improved chronologies could settle. How hierarchically organized were clusters of neighboring settlement (not to speak of the greater ambiguities of more dispersed groupings)? To the degree that hierarchy can be demonstrated, was it durable or intermittent, or even oscillating in polarity? How condent can we be that settlements identied as contemporary on the basis of ceramic afnities were fully equivalent in their actual spans of occupation? Joyce Marcus rightly calls attention to the strong propaganda component of Mesoamerican hieroglyphic inscriptions, requiring us to view claims of subjugation with considerable skepticism. Hypogamous marriages of Maya princesses from larger centers to rulers of smaller ones can reinforce such claims, but this does not exclude the possibility of arrangements entered into for mutual political or economic advantage (1992:401). In any case, the formal memorialization of a relationship at a given moment says little about either its real content or its durability. In what is presently known of the life span of major Mesoamerican centers Marcus nds persuasive evidence of cyclicity. But the length of the cycles she has so far been able to detect reafrms the limitations of archaeological evidence. Durable hegemonic regimes are assumed to last for centuries (in Monte Albans case, more than a millennium) before giving way to rivals. Yet on overwhelming historical evidence, of worldwide scope, ascendancy in such hierarchies is inherently unstable and typically limited to a few generations at most. A more reasonable alternative is to assume that monumental centers might retain

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their ritual and symbolic role through bewildering shifts of political authority overand within!them. Such is known to have been the case in the more adequately documented Mesopotamian case, where successful monarchs repeatedly credited themselves with rebuilding temples in cities they had subjugated. Ceremonial inscriptional and building activity, in other words, need not be correlated at all closely with contentious, uctuating patterns of territorial control. Other, more direct ways are needed to work out the details of the latter. But here, as Marcus ruefully points out (1992:394, 407), we encounter a serious methodological problem with the chronological insensitivity of archaeological surveys. If the object is to detect temporary, contingent patterns of imperial control over areas of as much as several tens of thousands of square kilometers, our ends and means are simply not in keeping with one another. Lacking adequate ways of answering questions like these, reconstructions of many fundamental aspects of social life remain in a kind of diffuse, speculative limbo. These include a lot of what is at the heart of any approach to complexity, regional population density and measures of sociopolitical integration and of division of labor. Particularly left in a realm of conjecture are aspects of social variability within both regions and individual settlements, affecting patterns of ethnic differentiation and localized patterns of descent, afliation, and coresidence. The extent to which hostilities dominated local interaction is another largely unanswered question. That the ancient Maya were at least on occasion ferociously warlike is the formerly unthinkable but now persuasive conclusion to be drawn primarily from new inscriptional evidence and representational art. But this is somewhat inconsistent with the apparent lack of military sophistication and the limited evidence for fortications. That suggests episodic,

fairly low intensity rather than continuous warfare with ad hoc mobilizations of mobile, heterogeneous forces clashing infrequently in the eld rather than defending well-dened frontiers or conducting sieges of xed strong-points. Such a pattern is amply conrmed by late pre-Hispanic central Mexican accounts, which again portray a surprising lack of sophistication in military tactics (Clendinnen 1985). While large Aztec forces repeatedly campaigned far to the southeast in the Guatemalan highlands (as may have also their central Mexican predecessors from Teotihuacan), something approaching a permanent, fortied frontier was maintained only against the hostile Tarascan kingdom to the west. Overall patterns of regional integration depend, in any case, as much on the character of these hostilities as on ceremonial exchange and royal intermarriage. Problems involving the intensity and synchronicity of interactions are only multiplied when we look beyond fairly localized regions to Mesoamerica as a whole. Within the limitations of temporal units still based largely on imprecise ceramic chronologies, George Cowgills (1997) impressive control of the enormous volume of relevant data from Teotihuacan leaves a disturbing impression of his accumulating doubts over the number and signicance of the ties between that great, unrivaled city and its contemporaries. If Cowgills view prevails, cultural evolution in Mesoamerica was largely of a cellular character, with the individual cells only marginally and sporadically in communication with one another. Acknowledging that my standpoint is one of general principles rather than knowledge of the details, this seems quite unlikely. It would require us to abandon the idea that what made Mesoamerica as a whole a nuclear area was the extensive role of mutual stimulation and diffusion, with frequent, signicant, and reciprocal contacts extending in many directions. With the partial exception of ancient Egypt,

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unusually compressed by its setting into a narrow, continuous line of settlement along the Nile, the prevailing pattern for all other emergent civilizations was one of polycentricity rather than mutual isolation. And in any case, recent research is strongly reafrming that Egypt was by no means immune to the stimulus of outside interaction. In recent decades archaeological surveys are introducing a less localized, more interactional point of view. Inescapably, however, place-oriented excavations remain the core of the discipline. While controversies over the earliest village or occurrence of some important trait may be partly linked to the quest for publicity, they also fundamentally reect this way of thinking. From within this mind-set, it requires a conscious, counterintuitive effort not to assume the existence of a kind of self-enclosing boundary around a particular locale of excavation, within which processes of change are viewed as largely endogenous. Reinforcing this natural predisposition may also be a continuing reaction against the excesses of older, now almost completely discredited, diffusionist doctrines. The effect is to take implausibly for granted that the most signicant social relationshipseven in far-ung states and civilizations, and even those relationships most tied to power, production, wealth, and access to resourcesare among kin and neighbors. This questionable outcome is by no means limited to site-focused excavations by archaeologists but applies with equal strength to the tradition of community-focused participant-observation in ethnography and social anthropology (Bennett 1980:204). My point is to question whether we can get very far with the principle of local autarky in reconstructing the emergence of early cities, states, and civilizations. All nuclear areas were of considerable geographic extent and so offered multiple attractive niches for human exploitation in diverse ecosystems. Together with surely

comparable conditions in surrounding regions, this ecosystemic diversity led to a range of mutually complementary directions of specialization as a basis for exchange. Moreover, as Ian Hodder has pointed out with special reference to the growth of social hierarchies,
there is more to exchange than economic advantageeven if social advantage is included in that term. Exchange involves the transfer of items that have symbolic and categorical associations. Within any strategy of legitimization, the symbolism of objects is manipulated in the construction of relations of dominance. The exchange of appropriate items forms social obligations, status, and power, but it also legitimates as it forms. (1982:209; cf. Haselgrove 1987:106)

Trade and interaction thus seem likely to have been a fundamentally creative, destabilizing, sometimes perhaps even critical force in the promotion the development of civilization. The same argument can be extended to increasingly rened products of specialized craftsmen, and thus to technological innovations of many kinds, whether originating locally or at a distance. A NEW APPROACH TO COMPLEXITY Studies along a different, broader front of scientic inquiry have meanwhile been endowing the cluster of concepts identied with complexity with more carefully specied signicance. The subject has become a many-stranded approach to diverse classes of phenomena whose principal characteristic is that their properties and behaviors cannot be adequately described or explained by the interaction of a few, relatively simple, law-like principles. Computer modeling plays a primary part in most of these efforts It enormously advances the speed of computation and provides a format of visualization that enhances recognition of patterning. The consequences of basic assumptions in a model can be very quickly deduced for a wide array of values, helping in the recognition of regularities and emergent struc-

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tures. An important effect of simulations, in other words, is not to mimic reality but to demonstrate the surprising, often counterintuitive outcomes that can be generated from multiple, parallel, interactive applications of alternative sets of simple rules. Simultaneously, however, simulations introduce and highlight methodological and theoretical issues that are common and intelligible to both the natural and social sciences. The subjects of studies falling within the framework of this new approach can be described as diverse sequences of change through time that exhibit unpredictable combinations of orderly and chaotic features. We see the combined inuence of various feedback effects, random or stochastic events and processes, and the sometimes long-term, determinative consequences of coincidental combinations of initial conditions. Especially in the case of living and social systems that are adaptive in character, an important causal feature seems to be the behavioral variability of individual agents that systemic models can only represent by aggregating. This new concern for complexity highlights a somewhat different set of considerations than is suggested by city, state, and civilization as examples of our traditional archaeological categories. The primary focus of scientic attention is turned away from ever-more-rened accounts of internal structure and toward boldly generalizing, transdisciplinary explanations of form, function, and change. High-level as cities, states, and civilizations may seem to most of us as archaeological categories, they all fall within the larger category of complex adaptive systemssystems composed of interacting agents whose array of individual behaviors conform to rules that can be consciously or unconsciously modied through an adaptive learning process. There are deep uniformities in complex adaptive systems and processes of all

kinds. They serve as illuminating interconnections between human social systems and such general biological phenomena as the adaptation of species and populations to environmental change through natural selection, or the immune systems adaptive ability to form antibodies, or the brain and nervous systems ability to learn. John Ziman, an eminent historian and epistemologist of science, offers a penetrating as well as critical assessment of the present state of play within this still rapidly developing eld:
Complexity is another country: they do things differently there. It seems essential to learn an appropriate language for, say, characterizing a system by the diversity of its components and their interactions, for providing a natural denition of the function of a part of a complex system, or for interpreting evolutionary drift toward a phase transition between sub-critical and supra-critical behaviour. This type of analysis is still far from established as a formal theoretical discipline, but it is very instructive in showing that functionally integrated, self-constructing, far-from-equilibrium systems do have their own laws and lawlike patterns of behaviour. (2000:51)

The search for complexity as it is manifested in adaptive social systems calls attention immediately to differences in experience, motivation, and empowerment among individual agents. Reecting learning primarily acquired from interactions with one another, these differences are a critical source of adaptive change. For some of the principal pioneers of complexity theory, they seem to be, in fact, the major and most compelling ones that provide the basis for model-building, aggregative categories (Holland 1995:1011, 93). The Santa Fe Institute is the principal center wholly devoted to the new sciences of complexity. Closely interacting there (as well as under its auspices by Internet) is an extraordinary array of ideas and talents continuously engaged, to borrow Joseph Schumpeters (1975:84) characterization of capitalism, in creative destruction. The Santa Fe location, initially (and still today)

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permits it to draw upon the human resources of nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory. Simultaneously, it brings SFI within the widely shared Southwestern United States archaeological perimeter of traditional expertise and emphasis. What are the advantages to be gained by archaeologists through this different, considerably more rigorous use of the concept of complexity? An important characteristic of complex, adaptive systems is a recognition of periodic path dependency, a dependence of the trajectory of change not on the current values of driving forces alone but on history. Unpredictability in such cases can be followed by high predictability, as a system becomes locked in and hence insensitive to perturbations. Path dependency can result from increasing returns to scale and agglomeration. The rst cities to appear, for example, were by virtue of their greater size and population able to dominate a surrounding landscape of smaller towns. Similarly, particular improvements in agricultural or craft technologies that had been made possible by the new concentrations of human and natural resources in early cities could become locked-in by urban supremacy, leading (for a time) to a suppression of later improvements made in subordinate centers. Hypertrophy of institutional development and investments in infrastructure can become a kind of dead hand of sunk costs that also impedes adaptive change. All self-reinforcing processes tend to build their own infrastructures, hence tending to lead toward irreversibility. Finally, historical accidents (e.g., fortuitous discoveries, climatic crises, exceptional individuals) may play a major role under some circumstances, outweighing the effects of longer-term, presumably more basic, driving forces. Implicated in the new approach to complexity is a concern for all these processes (Arthur 1989). Evolving systems, to proceed to the most fundamental level, cannot be understood by isolating their components and addi-

tively assembling sets of the interactions between small numbers of these components. In dealing with the appearance over time of new classes of phenomena we must expect instead to confront the emergence of new wholes that are different from the sum of their parts. This is the emergent novelty familiar to evolutionary biologists, but detectable in the physical sciences as well. More is different, as is aptly stated in the title of a classic refutation of the adequacy of reductionism as a scientic program by physics Nobel Prize winner Philip Anderson, an SFI founder:
The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe . . . . The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difculties of scale and complexity . . . at each new level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. (1972:393)

Social systems, like all adaptive, living systems, are structured composites of individual agents with different as well as common endowments. They interact in accordance with historically derived, although situationally reinterpreted and never entirely rigid, needs, aspirations, and patterns of afnity. Viewed through the narrow aperture of a myopic search for law-like regularities, the results are likely to be bafing. But unprecedented new patterns of self-organization typically can appear in such systems quite suddenly, after long intervals of relative quiescence during which there are only smaller, slowly accumulating changes. Complex systems, then, will be characteristically composed of older, fossil-like elements coexisting with other elements of new, emergent levels of articulation, differentiation, and synthesis. The multiple instances of the rise of early complex societies are classic examples of this process at work. How do abrupt, qualitative changes occur? They would be difcult to explain if

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adaptation took the form of a consistent, uniform striving for functional efciency. But as economist Peter Allen observes, the (social as well as natural) environment to which adaptation must take place is itself complex, differentiated, uncertain, and demanding:
In an evolutionary landscape of hills and valleys representing levels of functional efciency of different possible organisms, it is the error-maker who can move up a hill, eventually out-competing a perfectly reproducing rival . . . evolution does not lead to optimal behavior, because evolution concerns not only efcient performance but also the constant need for new discoveries. What is found is that variability at the microscopic level, individual diversity, is part of the evolutionary strategy of survivors, and this is precisely what mechanical systems representations do not include. In other words, in the shifting landscape of a world in continuous evolution, the ability to climb is perhaps what counts, and what we see as a result of evolution are not species or rms with optimal behavior at each instant, but rather actors that can learn! (Allen 1988:107108)

Qualitative change may originate as either a spontaneous or a deliberate process. But in either case it usually takes the form of a sudden perception of unforeseen possibilities in a seemingly useless or even erroneous course already in existence at the margins. Deviants or error-makers ideas and initiatives, crossing some lower threshold of frequency or plausibility, then are discovered by widening circles of adoptersor are imposed by a handful of newly empowered onesto meet new, or at least previously unrecognized, challenges and needs. In the parlance of complexity theorists, the nonlinear, largely unpredictable outcome, a more or less organized shift by the larger community, can be thought of as skirting the ambiguous interface between controlled and chaotic behavior. APPLICABILITY TO EARLY CITIES AND STATES How does a general concern for modeling the irregular courses of increasing com-

plexity contribute to an understanding of the processes by which early states and civilizations emerged? I will concentrate on the example of southern Mesopotamia, both because I know it best and because of the unparalleled supplementation of archaeological evidence there by textual sources. Begin with the unprecedented size of its early city-states, on Andersons more is different principle. Positive feedbacks link together many manifestations of enlargement of population and territorial size. Whether or not conforming in every respect with modern denitions of urbanism, unprecedentedly large primate centers made their appearance (as in most nuclear areas) coincident with civilization itself. Their superior strength was underwritten by the larger populations assembled within them. Based on their unequaled capacities to project power at a distance were other, related capacities to impose patterns of authoritarian domination, labor mobilization, and tribute exaction on outlying domains. Joyce Marcus (1998) has recently suggested that for early states as a class signicant increases in scale may be the single, most decisive variable in the whole process. It does indeed seem that increasing scale is a necessaryalthough hardly a sufcient condition. With increasing scale, for example, there will appear an increasing number of nichesof complementary subsistence resources, of opportunities for crafts and other forms of specialization, of luxuries and exotics to heighten the signicance of rituals and enhance elite status, and to detach social hierarchies from purely local levels of interaction and concern. In most cases primate center growth seems to have been too rapid to have resulted from natural population increases alone. Hence the inux from more dispersed hinterlands is likely to have involved an element of persuasion if not compulsion. Given the constraint of relatively

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primitive transport, at least the larger examples of the new centers could not be regularly sustained with food and other resources without an element of coercion in the form of imposed tribute or corve labor. So the styles and symbols proclaiming ascendancy had the implicit role of helping to overawe both potential opponents and disaffected supporters. Early state societies must have been for the most part risky, transitory constructs. Neatly conical models of concentrated ruling authority are unlikely to have persisted for long without being internally as well as externally challenged, perhaps especially at moments of dynastic succession. Permanently ranked, hierarchical patterns are therefore likely to have alternated periodically with various forms of institutional rivalry or heterarchy (Stein 1997:7). Often driven to extend territorial control to the limit of their organizational and military resources, they could be exposed to systemthreatening crises by even minor environmental uctuations or internal ssiparous tendencies. But if larger state or protoimperial congurations came and went, the early cities in which power and resources were concentrated were longer lived. Fluctuating military fortunes might favor one or another, but as a group their superior size permitted them to retain a superior capacity to amass, defend, and deploy resources vis--vis their hinterlands. This also explains why they continue to receive a grossly disproportionate share of archaeological attention. Partly paralleling the more is different principle is what Robert Merton (1973) has called the Matthew Effect: To him who hath will be given more. Or specically, the allocation of rewards and resources tends to be strongly skewed in favor of the seeker/recipient who has already attained higher status and reputation. Advantages owed to the city at the expense of the smaller town and countryside, while within cities they were enormously concentrated in the

hands of relatively small upper strata. An increasing layering of social hierarchies and of the administrative apparatus was a result, accompanied by increasingly differentiated roles, ceremonies, and markers of prestige. Coordinate with processes of political and socioeconomic stratication was an increasingly subdivided division of labor. This led to craft and craftsmanship hierarchies and proliferating demands for enhanced, better assured supplies of exotic goods and raw materials. Systems of subsistence are also likely to have become increasingly large-scale, differentiated, and complex. Urban populations may have continued to be primarily engaged in agriculture at the outset. But as they grew, the increasing proportion that gravitated or was co-opted into the crafts, service occupations, cult observances, and administrative activities presupposes a corresponding intensication and specialization within the food-producing sector. Andrew Sherratt (1981) has characterized this process as a secondary products revolution, and there certainly is a conceptual coherence among specialized advances that in the Near East were concentrated in animal husbandry. Alongside of increases in the scale and specialized management of animal herds were differentiation within herds for breeding stock, meat supply, and working stock, specialized procedures and equipment for milk and milk products, and the growing importance of wool and its processing. Whatever their earlier origins, the formation of cities and states brought a newly emergent quality to all of these developments. It was less and less devoted merely to serving the ends of a localized, perennially at-risk subsistence economy and was instead primarily directed toward the new priorities of forcibly extending and defending an enlarged population-and-resource base, ritual elaboration, prestigious display, and the preparation of costly, labor-inten-

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sive articles (above all textiles) for use in long-distance trade. Textile production, in particular (because of its high value-toweight ratio), quickly took on a quasi-industrial aspect. In Mesopotamia, where we see this most clearly in textual archives, this involved a marked enhancement of the institution of slavery into a state enterprise rather than a domestic one. The increasing subjection of large numbers of women and their dependents into this role had important secondary consequences for gender relations. These constitute a kind of lock-in of the superordinate economys trade relations, in the parlance of complexity theory. Technology was in general a key sphere of increasing complexity. Internal stratication and growing stress on an external projection of authority and prestige clearly led to an increasing differentiation between mundane and ritual or luxury articles. The production of luxuries, in turn, directed an increasing component of external trade toward the procurement of precious or exotic substances. That led to more pronounced gradations in skill, responsibility, and status among producers. A distinction merely between full- and part-time specialists, long ago stressed by Childe, now seems entirely too simple. It may even be actively misleading (Stein 1998:10). The more recently suggested distinction between independent and attached specialists (Brumel and Earle 1987:5) seems more promising. The expanded scale of territorial control associated with early states brought other new demands for political control mechanisms. The risk-reducing advantages of environmental diversity were sought by imposing a degree of economic integration on a larger region. That also imposed an enhanced burden of transport requirements, much of which could be shifted to subjugated populations. Categories and degrees of dependency furnished another dimension of increasing complexity. Numbers increased greatly, with male war prisoners as a result of rising militarism and with

women impressed into textile-producing activity. This must have been accompanied by more repressive administrative innovations. Uncertainties over uctuations in food and other supplies were never wholly avoidable, and were a growing danger as population grew. In times of social breakdown or political crisis such uctuations could become devastating, forcing impoverished herdsmen or cultivators into domestic dependency. Measures to offset minor perturbations no doubt were frequent. But insofar as they met with shortterm success they encouraged system growth at the expense of heightened fragility when the perturbations later exceeded tolerable limits (Adams 1978). In the short run, if provisions for the mobilization and concentration of reserves became increasingly imperative with the appearance of population concentrations of urban scale, they were also more readily attainable with new, urban-based forms of sociopolitical organization. Directing and interconnecting all of these developments was a need for increasing ows of information. By incorporating growing numbers of requirements into a received body of tradition and a corporate memory it added new historical complexities to every level of decision-making. Writing, although not uniformly developing in every early civilization to a stage deserving this unrestricted characterization, thus tends to play a decisive part in broader technological congurations wherever it appears. Crossing some threshold of functional utility, its development inevitably led to explosive increases in conceptual as well as procedural complexity. All of these characterizations of complexity have a common core. It consists of the emergence and proliferation of sets of systems or subsystems that are distinguished from those present in simpler societies by relatively more differentiated and advanced internal structures. Existing along-

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side one another, under conditions allowing for slowly growing self-determination (and probably self-consciousness), were suprafamily and local community groupings in increasingly specialized, frequently unstable relations with one another. Examples includeto cite only a handful: elites and commonersboth categories with many internal gradationsand often factions; uneasily coexisting ethnicities within larger, articially imposed, more hierarchically managed communities; many new degrees, varieties, and rankings of specialization of human activity; overlapping, intermittently rival domains of primarily religious, politico-military, or administrative authority; coexisting traditional and altered gender roles, with the latter characterized by partial replacement of kin-group production-for-use by forms of massed dependency or slavery especially affecting women; forms of association and collective activity more governed by primordial kin, ethnic, and other ascriptive ties, alongside others more open to individualized choice; and, perhaps most generally, groups and strategies stressing sustainability tied to authoritarian control, constancy, predictability, and the demand for steady-state optimization of performance, alongside others stressing greater resilience in adapting to less predictable conditions, further from equilibrium and less amenable to control, that might require a readiness to make sudden, fundamental changes in structure. Viewed over a span of time, these differentiated segments, strata, or strategies are unlikely to have developed at the same tempo or to have altered course abruptly and in the same direction. The existence of grow-

ing internal as well as external ssures and tensions lends new signicance to issues of settlement composition, regional differentiation, and boundaries. REASSESSING THE RAMP VS STEP CONUNDRUM I once suggested that we could think of the emergence of complexityor of its archaeological cognates, cities, states, and civilizationsin terms of one of two contrastive metaphors, a ramp or a step. As an ideal type, a ramp implies a steady course and pace of development, a smoothly unfolding series of complementary trends following a seemingly linear path without abrupt transformations or temporary reversals. A step emphasizes more sudden and disjunctive changes, an abrupt step upward to a new plateau of complexity, followed by oscillations above and below the newly elevated mean (Adams 1966:170171). More than three decades ago it seemed impossible to decide which of these seemingly polar alternatives was more accurate and useful, imposing the uneasy choice of an intermediate alternative. This would slow the abruptness of the rate of change below that suggested by the analogy of a step, making provision for some continuing ramp-like progress as well as oscillations after the initial attainment of a new, urban or state-like level of integration. Returning once again to the same subject, the basis for making a choice is of course much altered. Excavations, often of impressive scale and multiseason duration, and with greatly improved standards of data recovery and publication, have multiplied in virtually all of the nuclear areas where political conditions have permitted advances in methods as well as unimpeded access. Regional surveys, growing in methodological rigor and increasingly relying on remote sensing data of rapidly improving availability and quality, are for the rst time supporting quantitative debates

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(still within wide margins of uncertainty) about ancient demographic levels and cycles, agricultural regimes, and the shifting tensions and balances between life in the major centers and in rural hinterlands. As a result, the formerly accepted perimeters of all the nuclear areas have been pushed outward in virtually every direction. And earlier barriers to communication between archaeologists and humanistic, textually oriented scholars are disappearing as a new generation of young professionals moves into leadership with systematic training in both. None of these developments, however, has decisively reduced the difculties and ambiguities of the ramp vs step choice. The expanding geographic perimeters of interaction may be a partial exception. In reinforcing a pluralistic, polycentric understanding of the geographic base for the emergence of urban and state-level societies, it may argue against the likelihood that urban or state-like features in any nuclear area had been narrowly conned at their origins to a single locus or very brief upward step. But this is admittedly inconclusive evidence. On the other hand, two other research themes with which I have been involved more recently seem at least partly convergent in turning the search for a resolution of the conundrum in a new direction. In the rst, retaining the same basic concern with long-term cultural evolution, I sought out an alternative approach involving the character and contexts of technological change during later epochs that are at least relatively much better documented (Adams 1996:xixvi). The second, given special emphasis here, explores the analytical power of the new sciences of complexity. The Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early-to-mid-19th century England was just such a phase of fundamental, accelerated change as the multiple, initial episodes of urban and state formation. As noted earlier, the admittedly very broad and rough

similarity provided a stimulus and model for Childes (1950) rst formulation of the idea of an urban revolution a half-century ago. The comparison of the two is, furthermore, more apt than it would be with any of the numerous, politically oriented revolutions of the early modern to modern era. Those latter have elements of conscious leadership and the organization of opposing parties and programs that are essentially lacking in the Industrial Revolution and (to the best of our knowledge) in early states. One need not assume that there necessarily are any deep homologies in the processes involved in the two sides of this comparison. Nor is this the place to review the incomparably richer and more massive documentation that is available for the Industrial Revolution than for any comparable process of change which archaeologists may hope to identify. But there is a broad consensus among economic and technological historians about several aspects of the changes accompanying the Industrial Revolution: rst, that it was highly irregular in its impacts on different regions and economic sectors; second, that its growth was accompanied if not led by an accelerating tempo of innovation; third, that growth was concentrated in a small number of key sectors rather than generally distributedthe introduction of efcient steam engines as sources of rotary power, the mechanization of cotton textile production, iron and steel smelting on a progressively enlarged scale, and railroad building. As engines of capitalist growth, they led to growing concentrations of wealth and a widening readiness to accept the many risks and uncertainties of investing it in manufacturing. On the other hand, there are continuing disputes among specialists as to just how preponderantly industrial and disjunctively revolutionary the Industrial Revolution really was except in retrospect. The fundamental insight is one propounded many years ago by the great economist Joseph Schumpeter, that

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it is disharmonious or one-sided increase and shifts within the aggregate which matter. Aggregative analysis . . . not only does not tell the whole tale but necessarily obliterates the main (and only interesting) point of the tale. (1939:134)

Essentially the same lesson emerges from a further application of complexity theory not mentioned earlierone that in important respects serves to unify and intensify the effects of the whole ensemble. The pursuit of innovation and novelty is not a stable, uniformly distributed motivation in every social setting. Instead it is a context-dependent emergent, stimulated by the presence and interaction of many forces for change like those just outlined. Perhaps we can think of an upwelling of activity, more or less consciously directed toward innovation that is triggered by the roughly contemporary crossing of some threshold of accelerated change by a number of separate, normally independent and fairly linear processese.g., craft specialization and the growth of elite hierarchies. Once set in motion by a sense of new demands and opportunities, a more highly motivated pursuit of innovations would both encourage general experimentation with unfamiliar courses of action and undermine traditional barriers to pan-societal communication and processes of cross-fertilization. Some increase in the general rate of change would be a likely outcome. Even if this aggregate was extremely modest (as it is credibly argued to have been during the Industrial Revolution), over a span of considerably less than a century it could still account for nothing less than an economic transformation. This change in tempo is precisely what Childe sought to capture by rst calling attention to what he described as an urban revolution. And the occurrence of a similar change in tempo can also be assumed during what is often characterized as the food-producing revolution at the time of the earliest onset of agriculture. A crucial component of growing complexity, in other words, was a new or sig-

nificantly enhanced capacity for strategic abstraction in making judgments and taking actionmore specifically, in formulating rules and modifying them on the basis of experience, in weighing risks and uncertainties within the same scale of calculation rather than considering them incommensurables, in organizing associative action more persuasively and efficiently, and in searching out previously unforeseen opportunities for change and improvement. Translated into an archaeological context, this is what the phrase common among complexity theorists emergent capacity for self-organization is all about. It is perhaps most fundamentally for this reason that a research program focusing on the unifying theme of complexity deserves consideration by archaeologists. Emergence is a multilevel phenomenon, involving the convergence of many related and unrelated processes of change to produce entirely new, unforeseen qualities. Creative rather than merely additive, it finds a classic example in the rise of early states and civilizationsone of our oldest, but still most rewarding fields of study. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A brief, informal version of this paper was rst given in November 1997 at the Complex Society Groups Third Biennial Conference at the University of Arizona. I am indebted to John Bintliff for encouraging its enlargement into something more serious, a process that has undergone several successive revisions. Henry T. Wright and Guillermo Algaze made many helpful and penetrating suggestions and critical comments along the way.

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