Cultural Evolution Contemporary Viewpoints

Drawing on Kent Flannery's forty years of cross-cultural research in the area, the contributors to this collection reflect the current diversity of contemporary approaches to the study of cultural evolutionary processes. Collectively the volume expresses the richness of the issues being investigated by comparative theorists interested in long-term change, as well as the wide variety of data, approaches, and ideas that researchers are employing to examine these questions.

I. Introduction.- 1. Cultural Evolutionary Approaches and Archaeology: Past, Present, and Future.- II. Technological Change and Economic Specialization.- 2. Guilá Naquitz Revisited: Agricultural Origins in Oaxaca, Mexico.- 3. The Evolution of theTipití: A Study in the Process of Invention.- 4. Accelerated Technological Change in Archaeology and Ancient History.- 5. High-Intensity Household-Scale Production in Ancient Mesoamerica: A Perspective from Ejutla, Oaxaca.- III. Political Complexity and Its Emergence.- 6. Lightning and Jaguars: Iconography, Ideology, and Politics in Formative Cuicatlán, Oaxaca.- 7. Games, Players, Rules, and Circumstances: Looking for Understandings of Social Change at Different Levels.- 8. Modeling Tributary Economies and Hierarchical Polities: A Prologue.- 9. The Development of Administration from Collective to Centralized Economies in the Mesopotamian World: The Transformation of an Institution from System-Serving to Self-Serving.- IV. Conclusions.- 10. A Concluding Perspective on the Theoretical Contributions of Kent V. Flannery: Tenets for the Next Century of U.S. Archaeology.- Postscript.- Comprehensive Bibliography of Kent V. Flannery.