Any volume that includes the words “New Perspectives” in its title invites skepticism, as many past reviews show. The volume edited by Jeremy Sabloff and Paula Sabloff brings together 10 chapters that highlight and summarize the state of a project to apply complex systems models to human societies, focusing on the development of premodern states. Some chapters do, indeed, offer fresh views. Others, however, are reworkings of a dated processualist narrative.

Part I, “Background,” includes chapters by Jeremy Sabloff, Henry Wright, and Laura Fortunato. These authors jointly present an apologia for the use of complex systems models and a review of the history of evolutionary thought in which the key processes—population, resources, energy, and information—are portrayed as material. In contrast, eligion and ideology are portrayed as decidedly peripheral and limited to offering sanctification of the power of emergent elites.

J. Sabloff's introduction declares, “The complexity science approach to early states, as seen in the chapters in this volume, will…move us closer toward our goal: the understanding of how and why early states emerged independently in so many parts of the world and did not emerge in others” (p. 10). Wright reviews definitions of early states from the nineteenth century to the present. He opines that most models focus on a limited number of processes in the origin of states and suggests that complexity science methods are the most accurate in determining the nonlinear interdependence of the processes that resulted in early states. Fortunato provides an historical review of comparative interdisciplinary approaches, discussing the utility and problems of comparative analysis using standardized databases. Fortunato deals with several challenges, such as the non-independence of cases, but problematically accepts that such data are objective and theoretically neutral. Notably, she holds out the hope of moving beyond typological approaches and using more powerful quantitative analyses.

Part II, “New Research,” offers case studies. In Chapter 4, Paula Sabloff and Skyler Cragg examine status and role in archaic states. They find that states share many social statuses and concomitant roles that are not found in nonstates and suggest that states have common functional needs, such as the exchange of high-status women to build long-term alliances. Paul Hooper et al. (Chapter 5) and Timothy Kohler et al. (Chapter 6) attempt to refine the complex systems view through the use of agent-based modeling. They create simulations that propose fundamental relationships between agents and social systems. One of the traditional critiques of functionalism, of course, is that the organic analogy that sees societies as akin to biological systems is deeply flawed. Attempts to model smaller-scale units, such as corporate groups and individuals, are a welcome addition to the model, but still fail to overcome the objection that in social systems, unlike biological ones, factions can exist so that the system is more concatenated than integrated. Still, the effort to introduce some type of human agency into model building is a notable improvement on previous efforts. In Chapter 7, Scott Ortman, Lily Blair, and Peter Peregrine seek to describe broad processes by documenting basic patterns in social evolution using standardized databases. They argue that the ways in which “networks of matter, energy, and information” (212) are patterned across human societies exhibit strong correlations among a few key factors extracted from those standardized data.

Part III, “Syntheses,” returns to theory on a grander scale. Ortman (Chapter 8) presents what may be the most ambitious project in the volume. He proposes replacing neo-Darwinian theories of social evolution with a model of what he calls cultural genotypes. In his view, culture is a system for representing, storing, and retrieving information, and such information is stored largely via metaphors that exist physically within the brain. To simplify, one can say that culture consists of a shared set of metaphors and systems of such metaphors that change over time. Ortman proposes to model human societies via social scaling theory and further suggests that there are significant benefits of scale in human groups. Regarding increased social complexity, Ortman writes, “The most fundamental constraint on the emergence of social complexity is cultural genotypes that support the growth of densely acting social networks” (p. 236). In other words, to scale up, societies need metaphors that permit prosocial behavior toward socially distant people. This model is certainly ambitious, but fails to overcome the conflation of the biological and the social. In the end, the selective processes look more Skinnerian than Darwinian. In Chapter 9, Peregrine returns to more traditional neo-evolutionary themes, analyzing why many types of social formation recurred in the past. He proposes that convergent evolution in social formations occurs because there are limited ways of adapting to any particular environment. He finds that traditional taxonomies of cultural evolution “represent, at least in a broad context, social reality” (p. 291). It is perplexing that after all this sophisticated modeling we are back to bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. The concluding Chapter 10, by Sabloff and Sabloff, notes that the application of complexity science has not achieved widespread acceptance in archaeology, so they propose an intermediate step of pattern recognition to be used for comparative studies.

Most archaeologists, consciously or unconsciously, create and use models of varying levels of specificity and detail, but do not engage in the formal modeling created by systems scientists. Most archaeologists of complex societies also engage in comparative analysis by drawing on examples, both empirical and theoretical, from multiple parts of the world, but do not use standardized databases in the effort. Complex modeling offers promise if it can include the traits of consciousness, agency, and culture that make human societies different from biological systems.

Archaeologists trained in the processualist tradition and those committed to analogies derived from selectionist models may find new gems in this volume, whereas those committed to the autonomy of social sciences may find the enterprise suspect.