6 - Too many chiefs? (or, Safe texts for the '90s)

Summary

For the past three decades, the prevailing “model” that has been used by archaeologists to investigate the rise of the earliest states is that of “neoevolutionism” – the stepladder model of bands becoming tribes, then chiefdoms, and finally states (Fig. 6.1). In the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, some – but not by any means all – archaeologists (see below for references) questioned the utility of the received model, leaving the situation unresolved for the 1990s. For example:

The neoevolutionist perspective in anthropology … is neither dead nor seriously ailing; with appropriate modifications it can continue to enhance our understanding of the development of complex human societies

(Spencer 1990: 23).

The data from sequences of early state formation do not neatly fit neoevolutionary expectations

(Paynter 1989: 387).

Such obvious and irreconcilable beliefs as to what a state (or, indeed, a chiefdom) is arise from the intellectual exercise inherent in classificatory theory … (I)t is time for us to reject typological theory in favor of a perspective that more closely conforms to observable evolutionary reality

(Bawden 1989: 330).

In this essay I briefly review the arguments that have been made both for and against the typological stage–level neoevolutionary model; I further consider the social and intellectual contexts that help us understand why many archaeologists who once accepted the model now seem ready to jettison it.