The evolution of simple society

Abstract

Anglophone archaeology arose to explain what we now refer to as the emergence of complex society. This article reviews complexity theory from its nineteenth-century origins in Darwinian thought to contemporary studies of social evolution. Rather than making a case for the continued theorization of complexity, however, this review advances the proposition that a new inquiry into the historical development of social simplicity should be inaugurated, one in which simplicity is understood as a derived trait that has evolved in creative opposition to complexity. Examples of what such an inquiry might look like are drawn from recent research into the archaeology of indigenous North America.