There is an irony in beginning a book on the “evolution of the earliest states and civilizations” with an apology for using the term “evolution.” Nevertheless, it is far from unusual for archaeologists (e.g. Hegmon 2003) to eschew the term in favor of discussing “social change,” “social development,” or the like. Critics have argued that social evolution presents a theory of how history is a continuation of biological evolution, in which societies advance from lower to higher forms. Such “neo-evolutionary” theory has been used to justify racism, the exploitation of colonized peoples, and Occidental contempt towards other cultures (Godelier 1986:3). Social evolution has, not entirely unfairly, been characterized as an illusion of history, as a Hegelian prophecy of a rational process that culminated in the modern bourgeois state, capitalist economies, and technological advance. Such criticisms are by no means new, and exuberant schools of disenchantment that are today common in anthropology and other faculties disdain the idea of social evolution in all its forms. Little wonder that many archaeologists are uncomfortable with the term.

Although I criticize neo-evolutionary theory as it has been used in archaeology and anthropology, that is, the attempt to create categories of human progress and to fit prehistoric and modern “traditional” societies into them (which stems from the nineteenth-century founders Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor and was represented in the mid-twentieth century by Leslie White and Julian Steward and others), I find “evolution” an appropriate term for investigating the kinds of social change depicted in this book.