Understanding Early Large-Scale Collectives: A Global Perspective

This volume brings together perspectives from different parts of the world that showcase the wide variety of practices, institutions, and ideologies that allowed for shared identities and coordinated actions across broad collectives.It shows that there are many ways that people can work together. How did the world’s first large-scale collectives come into being?For much of our discipline’s history, the answer was the state.People learned how to be part of a larger community via political, economic, and social scaffolding that tended to build from earlier ways of living in a region.This scaffolding was often wobbly and always under construction-its flexibility often a design strength rather than a flaw.This book demonstrates that violence and rulers often played pivotal roles in large-scale collectives, but so did gender complementarity, markets, ritual centers, fictive kinship, and egalitarianism.Earlier evolutionary approaches tended to obscure both the variability and malleability of