Elizabeth M. Brumfiel – författare

This book, a comparative study of specialized production in prehistoric societies, examines both adaptionist and political approaches to specialization and exchange using a worldwide perspective. What forms of specialization and exchange promote social stratification, political integration and institutional specialization? Can increases in specialization always be linked to improved subsistence strategies or are they more closely related to the efforts of political elites to strengthen coalitions and establish institutions of control? Are valuables as important as subsistence goods in the developmental process? These and other questions are examined in the contexts of ten prehistoric societies, ranging from the incipient complexity of Mississippian chiefdoms through to the more complex systems of West Africa, Hawaii and Bronze Age Europe, to the agrarian states of Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Peru and Yamato Japan. Each society is the subject of a separate study by a scholar whose own research has provided new insights into the interplay of specialization, exchange and social complexity in the region studied.

Factionalism is an important force of social transformation, and this volume examines how factional competition in the kinship and political structures in ancient New World societies led to the development of chiefdoms, states and empires. The case studies, from a range of New World societies, represent all levels of non-egalitarian societies and a wide variety of ecological settings in the New World. They document the effects of factionalism on the structure of particular polities: for example, how it might have led to the growth of social inequality, or to changing patterns of chiefly authority, or to state formation and expansion, or institutional specialisation. The work is a creative and substantial contribution to our understanding of the political dynamics in early state society, and will interest archaeologists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians.