With the appearance of complex (transegalitarian) hunter/gatherers, we enter into an entirely different cultural realm – one that is not egalitarian and does not shy away from competition based on economic production to underwrite bids for greater influence and greater benefits. Feasts become the arenas for economically based competition and many other gambits for power, prestige, spouses, and capital. Feasts become the venues for social and political negotiations; feasts are the seat of village governments (Beynon 2000:31; Clarke 2001:163; 1998). At times, the importance of feasts, the array of different kinds of feasts, and the exalted importance of feasts become bewildering. There are lavish feasts for coming of age, for marriages, funerals, building houses, solstices, succession to political roles, and many other events. Nothing could be further from the behavior of the simple foragers that we saw in the preceding chapter. To understand the nature of and the reasons for this change, I discuss in further detail some of the characteristics of these societies and some of the ideas about why such changes took place. We then explore the principles on which transegalitarian feasting was based and some of the resulting characteristics, followed by a sampling of ethnographic and archaeological examples (see Figure 4.1).