This book reintroduces an African perspective on archaeological theorizing about complex societies.

Chiefs are political operatives who hold titles of leadership over groups larger than intimate kin-based communities. Although they rule with the consent of the

Offers a new framework for understanding the transformation of the Native American South during the first centuries of the colonial era.

In recent decades anthropology, especially ethnography, has supplied the prevailing models of how human beings have constructed, and been constructed by, their

What many anthropologists regard as the major step in political development occurred when, for the first time in history, previously autonomous villages gave up