Abstract
Throughout the history of archaeology, researchers have evaluated human societies in terms of systems and systems interactions. Complex systems theory (CST), which emerged in the 1980s, is a framework that can explain the emergence of new organizational forms. Its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics and account for human agency make CST a powerful analytical framework for archaeologists. While CST has been present within archaeology for several decades (most notably through the use of concepts like resilience and complex adaptive systems), recent increases in the use of methods like network analysis and agent-based modeling are accelerating the use of CST among archaeologists. This article reviews complex systems approaches and their relationship to past and present archaeological thought. In particular, CST has made important advancements in studies of adaptation and resilience, cycles of social and political development, and the identification of scaling relationships in human systems. Ultimately, CST helps reveal important patterns and relationships that are pivotal for understanding human systems and the relationships that define different societies.
Similar content being viewed by others
References Cited
Allen, K. J., Reide, F., Gouramanis, C., Keenan, B., Stoffel, M., Hu, A., and Ionita, M. (2022). Coupled insights from the palaeoenvironmental, historical and archaeological archives to support social-ecological resilience and the sustainable development goals. Environmental Research Letters 17: 055011. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6967
Allen, T. F. H, and Starr, T. B. (1982). Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Alleway, H. K., Klein, E. S., Cameron, L., Douglass, K., Govia, I., Guell, C., et al. (2023). The shifting baseline syndrome as a connective concept for more informed and just responses to global environmental change. People and Nature 5: 885–896.
Altaweel, M., and Palmisano, A. (2019). Urban and transport scaling: Northern Mesopotamia in the Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26: 943–966. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-018-9400-4
Altschul, J. H., Kintigh, K. W., Klein, T. H., Doelle, W. H., Hays-Gilpin, K. A., Herr, S. A., et al. (2017). Opinion: Fostering synthesis in archaeology to advance science and benefit society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114: 10999–11002.
Andrei, A., and Kennedy, W. (2013). Agent-based models and ethnography: Combining qualitative and computational techniques with complexity theory. Practicing Anthropology 35: 29–33.
Angelbeck, B., and Grier, C. (2012). Anarchism and the archaeology of anarchic societies: Resistance to centralization in the Coast Salish region of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Current Anthropology 53: 547–587. https://doi.org/10.1086/667621
Anschuetz, K. F., Wilhusen, R. H., and Scheick, C. L. (2001). An archaeology of landscapes: Perspectives and directions. Journal of Archaeological Research 9: 157–211.
Anthony, D. W. (1990). Migration in archeology: The baby and the bathwater. American Anthropologist 92: 895–914. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1990.92.4.02a00030
Arponen, V. P. J., Dörfler, W., Feeser, I., Grimm, S., Groß, D., Hinz, M., et al. (2019). Environmental determinism and archaeology: Understanding and evaluating determinism in research design. Archaeological Dialogues 26: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203819000059
Arrow, H., McGrath, J. E., and Berdahl, J. L. (2000). Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development, and Adaptation, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
Baggio, J. A., BurnSilver, S. B., Arenas, A., Magdanz, J. S., Kofinas, G. P., and Domenico, M. D. (2016). Multiplex social ecological network analysis reveals how social changes affect community robustness more than resource depletion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113: 13708–13713. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1604401113
Bailey, G. (1981). Concepts, time-scales and explanations in economic prehistory. Economic Archaeology 96: 97–117.
Bailey, G. (2008). Time perspectivism: Origins and consequences. In Holdaway, S., and Wandsnider, L. (eds.), Time in Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 13–30.
Balbo, A. L., Rubio-Campillo, X., Rondelli, B., Ramírez, M., Lancelotti, C., Torrano, A., et al. (2014). Agent-based simulation of Holocene monsoon precipitation patterns and hunter-gatherer population dynamics in semi-arid environments. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 21: 426–446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-014-9203-1
Barnett, R. L., Charman, D. J., Johns, C., Ward, S. L., Bevan, A., Bradley, S. L., et al. (2020). Nonlinear landscape and cultural response to sea-level rise. Science Advances 6: eabb6376. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb6376
Barton, C. M. (2014). Complexity, social complexity, and modeling. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 21: 306–324.
Barton, C. M., Ullah, I. I., and Bergin, S. (2010). Land use, water and Mediterranean landscapes: Modelling long-term dynamics of complex socio-ecological systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368: 5275–5297. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0193
Beekman, C. S. (2005). Agency, collectivities, and emergence: Social theory and agent based simulations. In Baden, W. W. (ed.), Nonlinear Models for Archaeology and Anthropology: Continuing the Revolution, Ashgate, Farnham, UK, pp. 51–79.
Bentley, R. A. (2003). An introduction to complex systems. In R. A. Bentley and H. D. G. Maschner (eds.), Complex Systems and Archaeology, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, pp. 9–23.
Bentley, R. A., Lake, M. W., and Shennan, S. J. (2005). Specialisation and wealth inequality in a model of a clustered economic network. Journal of Archaeological Science 32: 1346–1356. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2005.03.008
Bentley, R. A., and Maschner, H. D. (2001). Stylistic change as a self-organized critical phenomenon: An archaeological study in complexity. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8: 35–66.
Bentley, A., and Maschner, H. D. G. (eds.) (2003). Complex Systems and Archaeology: Empirical and Theoretical Applications, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Bentley, R. A., and Maschner, H. D. G. (2007). Complexity theory. In Bentley, R. A., Maschner, H. D. G., and Chippendale, C. (eds.), Handbook of Archaeological Theories, Altamira Press, Lanham, MD, pp. 245–270.
Bertalanffy, L. V. (1928). Kritische Theorie der Formbildung, Gebrüder Borntraeger, Berlin.
Bertalanffy, L. V. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, George Braziller, New York.
Bertalanffy, L. V. (1972). The history and status of general systems theory. Academy of Management Journal 15: 407–426. https://doi.org/10.2307/255139
Bettencourt L. M. A. (2013) The origins of scaling in cities. Science 340: 1438–1441.
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., and West, G. B. (2008). Why are large cities faster? Universal scaling and self-similarity in urban organization and dynamics. The European Physical Journal B 63: 285–293. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00250-6
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Yang, V. C., Lobo, J., Kempes, C. P., Rybski, D., and Hamilton, M. J. (2020). The interpretation of urban scaling analysis in time. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 17: 20190846. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2019.0846
Bettencourt, L. M., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., and West, G. B. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 7301–7306.
Binford, L. R. (1965). Archaeological systematics and the study of culture process. American Antiquity 31: 203–210.
Binford, S. R., and Binford, L. R. (eds.) (1968). New Perspectives in Archeology, Aldine, Chicago.
Bintliff, J. (1997). Catastrophe, chaos and complexity: The death, decay and rebirth of towns from antiquity to today. Journal of European Archaeology 5: 67–90. https://doi.org/10.1179/096576697800660302
Bird, D. W., Bird, R. B., Codding, B. F., and Taylor, N. (2016). A landscape architecture of fire: Cultural emergence and ecological pyrodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert. Current Anthropology 57: S65–S79. https://doi.org/10.1086/685763
Biskowski, M. (2004). Review of complex systems and archaeology: Empirical and theoretical applications [Review of Review of Complex Systems and Archaeology: Empirical and Theoretical Applications, by R. A. Bentley and H. D. G. Maschner]. Journal of Anthropological Research 60: 419–421.
Bliege Bird, R. (2015). Disturbance, complexity, scale: New approaches to the study of human–environment interactions. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 241–257. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013946
Bliege Bird, R., and Bird, D. W. (2020). Climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia: The firestick farming hypothesis. American Journal of Human Biology 33: e23527. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23527
Boas, F. (1896). The limitations of the comparative method of anthropology. Science 4: 901–908.
Boas, F. (1932). The aims of anthropological research. Science 76: 605–613.
Borck, L., and Sanger, M. C. (2017). An introduction to anarchism in archaeology. The SAA Archaeological Record 17: 9–16.
Bradtmöller, M., Grimm, S., and Riel-Salvatore, J. (2017). Resilience theory in archaeological practice–An annotated review. Quaternary International 446: 3–16.
Brown, C. T., Liebovitch, L. S., and Glendon, R. (2007). Lévy flights in Dobe Ju/’hoansi foraging patterns. Human Ecology 35: 129-138.
Brück, J. (2005). Experiencing the Past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12: 45–72.
Brughmans, T. (2010). Connecting the dots: Towards archaeological network analysis. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 29: 277–303. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2010.00349.x
Brughmans, T. (2013). Thinking through networks: A review of formal network methods in archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 20: 623–662. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9133-8
Burke, A., Peros, M. C., Wren, C. D., Pausata, F. S. R., Riel-Salvatore, J., Moine, O., et al. (2021). The archaeology of climate change: The case for cultural diversity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108537118
Caldwell, J. R. (1958). Trend and Tradition in the Prehistory of the Eastern United States, Memoir No. 88, American Anthropological Association, Menasha, WI.
Carneiro, R. L. (1970a). A quantitative law in anthropology. American Antiquity 35: 492–494.
Carneiro, R. L. (1970b). A theory of the origin of the state: Traditional theories of state origins are considered and rejected in favor of a new ecological hypothesis. Science 169: 733–738. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.169.3947.733
Caspari, R. (2009). 1918: Three perspectives on race and human variation. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139: 5–15.
Charnov, E. L. (1976). Optimal foraging, the marginal value theorem. Theoretical Population Biology 9: 129–136.
Clarke, D. L. (1972). Models in Archaeology, Methuen, London.
Clastres, P. (1989). Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. R. Hurley, Zone Books, New York.
Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truths: Writing culture. In Clifford, J., and Marcus, G. E. (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 1–26.
Clifford, J., and Marcus, G. E. (eds.) (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Codding, B. F., and Bird, D. W. (2015). Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science. Journal of Archaeological Science 56: 9–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2015.02.027
Contreras, D., Guiot, J., Suarez, R., and Kirman, A. (2018). Reaching the human scale: A spatial and temporal downscaling approach to the archaeological implications of paleoclimate data. Journal of Archaeological Science 93: 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2018.02.013
Costanza, R., Graumlich, L., Steffen, W., Crumley, C., Dearing, J., Hibbard, K., et al. (2007). Sustainability or collapse: What can we learn from integrating the history of humans and the rest of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36: 522–527. https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447(2007)36[522:SOCWCW]2.0.CO;2
Costopoulos, A. (2001). Evaluating the impact of increasing memory on agent behaviour: Adaptive patterns in an agent based simulation of subsistence. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 4. https://www.jasss.org/4/4/7.html
Crabtree, S. A., and Dunne, J. A. (2022). Towards a science of archaeoecology. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, S0169534722001744. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.07.010
Crabtree, S. A., Kahn, J. G., Jackson, R., Wood, S. A., McKechnie, I., Verhagen, P., et al. (2023). Why are sustainable practices often elusive? The role of information flow in the management of networked human-environment interactions. Global Environmental Change 78: 102597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102597
Crabtree, S. A., White, D. A., Bradshaw, C. J., Saltré, F., Williams, A. N., Beaman, R. J., et al. (2021). Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul. Nature Human Behaviour 5: 1303–1313.
Crema, E. R., Edinborough, K., Kerig, T., and Shennan, S. J. (2014). An approximate Bayesian computation approach for inferring patterns of cultural evolutionary change. Journal of Archaeological Science 50: 160–170.
Crumley, C. L. (1995). Heterarchy and the analysis of complex societies. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6: 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/ap3a.1995.6.1.1
Crumley, C. L. (2005). Remember how to organize: Heterarchy across disciplines. In Beekman, C. S., and Baden, W. W. (eds.), Nonlinear Models for Archaeology and Anthropology, Routledge, London, pp. 35–50.
d’Alpoim Guedes, J. A., Crabtree, S. A., Bocinsky, R. K., and Kohler, T. A. (2016a). Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: Climate and society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113: 14483–14491. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1616188113
d’Alpoim Guedes, J., Manning, S. W., and Bocinsky, R. K. (2016b). A 5,500-year model of changing crop niches on the Tibetan Plateau. Current Anthropology 57: 517–522.
d’Alpoim Guedes, J., and Bocinsky, R. K. (2018). Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia. Science Advances 4: eaar4491. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar4491
Daems, D. (2020). On complex archaeologies: conceptualizing social complexity and its potential for archaeology. Adaptive Behavior 28: 323-328.
Daems, D. (2021). Social Complexity and Complex Systems in Archaeology, Routledge, London.
Dan‐Cohen, T. (2020). Tracing complexity: The case of archaeology. American Anthropologist 122: 733–744.
Davies, B., Romanowska, I., Harris, K., and Crabtree, S. A. (2019). Combining geographic information systems and agent-based models in archaeology: Part 2 of 3. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7: 185–193. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2019.5
Davies, M. I. (2009). Wittfogel's dilemma: Heterarchy and ethnographic approaches to irrigation management in eastern Africa and Mesopotamia. World Archaeology 41: 16–35.
Davis, D. S. (2020). Studying human responses to environmental change: Trends and trajectories of archaeological research. Environmental Archaeology 25: 367–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2019.1639338
Davis, D. (2021). Theoretical repositioning of automated remote sensing archaeology: Shifting from features to ephemeral landscapes. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 4: 94–109.
Davis, D. S., Andriankaja, V., Carnat, T. L., Chrisostome, Z. M., Colombe, C., Fenomanana, F., et al. (2020). Satellite-based remote sensing rapidly reveals extensive record of Holocene coastal settlement on Madagascar. Journal of Archaeological Science 115: 105097. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105097
Davis, D. S., and Douglass, K. (2020). Aerial and spaceborne remote sensing in African archaeology: A review of current research and potential future avenues. African Archaeological Review 37: 9–24.
Davis, D. S., Seeber, K. E., and Sanger, M. C. (2021). Addressing the problem of disappearing cultural landscapes in archaeological research using multi-scalar survey. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 16: 524–540.
Davis, D. S., Rasolondrainy, T., Manahira, G., Hixon, S. W., Andriankaja, V., Hubertine, L., et al. (2023). Social networks as risk-mitigation strategies in south-west Madagascar. Antiquity 97: 1296–1312. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.123
Dean, J. S., Gumerman, G. J., Epstein, J. M., Axtell, R. L., Swedlund, A. C., Parker, M. T., and McCarroll, S. (2000). Understanding Anasazi culture change through agent-based modeling. In Kohler, T. A., and Gumerman, G. J. (eds.), Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 179–206.
Dearing, J. A. (2008). Landscape change and resilience theory: A palaeoenvironmental assessment from Yunnan, SW China. The Holocene 18: 117–127.
DeMarrais, E. (2013). Understanding heterarchy: Crafting and social projects in pre-Hispanic northwest Argentina. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23: 345–362.
Derrida, J. (1980). Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Djurdjevac Conrad, N., Helfmann, L., Zonker, J., Winkelmann, S., and Schütte, C. (2018). Human mobility and innovation spreading in ancient times: A stochastic agent-based simulation approach. EPJ Data Science 7: 24. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0153-9
Douglass, K., Morales, E. Q., Manahira, G., Fenomanana, F., Samba, R., Lahiniriko, F. et al. (2019). Toward a just and inclusive environmental archaeology of southwest Madagascar. Journal of Social Archaeology 19: 307–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605319862072
Douglass, K., and Rasolondrainy, T. (2021). Social memory and niche construction in a hypervariable environment. American Journal of Human Biology 33: e23557. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23557
Dunnell, R. C. (1971). Systematics in Prehistory, Free Press, New York.
Dunnell, R. C. (1992). The notion site. In Rossignol, J., and Wandsnider, L. (eds.), Space, Time, and Archaeological Landscapes, Plenum, New York, pp. 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2450-6_2
Dunnell, R. C., and Dancey, W. S. (1983). The siteless survey: A regional scale data collection strategy. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 6: 267–287. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-003106-1.50012-2
Durkheim, E. (1893). De la division du travail social [Division of Social Labour], Felix Alcan, Paris.
Durkheim, E. (1895). What is a social fact? In McGee, R., and Warms, R. (eds.), Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 78–85.
Dyson-Hudson, R., and Smith, E. A. (1978). Human territoriality: An ecological reassessment. American Anthropologist 80: 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1978.80.1.02a00020
Eerkens, J. W., and Lipo, C. P. (2005). Cultural transmission, copying errors, and the generation of variation in material culture and the archaeological record. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24: 316–334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2005.08.001
Ellen, R. (2010). Theories in anthropology and ‘anthropological theory.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: 387–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01631.x
Ellis, N. C. (1998). Emergentism, connectionism and language learning. Language Learning 48: 631–664. https://doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00063
Elsawah, S., Filatova, T., Jakeman, A. J., Kettner, A. J., Zellner, M. L., Athanasiadis, I. N., et al. (2020). Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling. Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling 2: 16226. https://doi.org/10.18174/sesmo.2020a16226
Erickson, C. L. (1999). Neo-environmental determinism and agrarian ‘collapse’ in Andean prehistory. Antiquity 73: 634–642. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00065236
Esteve-Altava, B., Marugan-Lobon, J., Botella, H., and Rasskin-Gutman, D. (2011). Network models in anatomical systems. Journal of Anthropological Sciences= Rivista Di Antropologia: JASS 89: 175–184.
Fabian, A. (2010). The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Faulseit, R. K. (2016). Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
Feinman, G. M. (2012). The emergence of social complexity: Why more than population size matters. In Carballo, D. M. (ed.), Cooperation and Collective Action: Archaeological Perspectives, University Press of Colorado, Boulder, pp. 35–56.
Feinman, G. M., and Carballo, D. M. (2018). Collaborative and competitive strategies in the variability and resiliency of large-scale societies in Mesoamerica. Economic Anthropology 5: 7–19.
Fisher, C. T., Hill, J. B., and Feinman, G. M. (2009). The Archaeology of Environmental Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience, University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Flannery, K. V. (1967). Culture history v. cultural process: A debate in American archaeology. Scientific American 217: 119–122.
Flannery, K. V. (1968). Archaeological systems theory and early Mesoamerica. In Meggers, B. J. (ed.), Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas, Anthropological Society of Washington, Washington, DC, pp. 67–87.
Flannery, K. V. (1972). The cultural evolution of civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3: 399–426.
Fletcher, M.-S., Hamilton, R., Dressler, W., and Palmer, L. (2021). Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118: e2022218118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022218118
Fretwell, S. D., and Lucas, H. L. (1969). On territorial behavior and other factors influencing habitat distribution in birds: I. Theoretical development. Acta Biotheoretica 19: 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01601953
Fuentes, A. (2016). The extended evolutionary synthesis, ethnography, and the human niche: Toward an integrated anthropology. Current Anthropology 57: S13–S26. https://doi.org/10.1086/685684
Furholt, M., Grier, C., Spriggs, M., and Earle, T. (2020). Political economy in the archaeology of emergent complexity: A synthesis of bottom-up and top-down approaches. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 27: 157–191.
Gauthier, N. (2021). Hydroclimate variability influenced social interaction in the prehistoric American Southwest. Frontiers in Earth Science 8: 620856. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2020.620856
Gavrilets, S., Anderson, D. G., and Turchin, P. (2010). Cycling in the complexity of early societies. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution 1: https://doi.org/10.21237/C7CLIO11193
Gell-Mann, M. (1994) Complex adaptive systems. In Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality. Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, No. 19, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, pp. 17–45.
Gell-Mann, M. (1995). What is complexity? Complexity 1(1): 16–19.
Gould, S. J., and Eldredge, N. (1977). Punctuated equilibria: The tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered. Paleobiology 3: 115–151.
Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago.
Graeber, D. (2014). On the moral grounds of economic relations: A Maussian approach. Journal of Classical Sociology 14: 65–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X13494719
Graeber, D., and Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 1st ed., Farrer, Straus and Giroux, London.
Graham, S. (2006). Networks, agent-based models and the Antonine itineraries: Implications for Roman archaeology. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 19: 45–64. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmea.2006.19.1.45
Grimm, V., Berger, U., Bastiansen, F., Eliassen, S., Ginot, V., Giske, J., et al. (2006). A standard protocol for describing individual-based and agent-based models. Ecological Modelling 198: 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2006.04.023
Grauer, K. C. (2021). Heterarchical political ecology: Commoner and elite (meta) physical access to water at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 62: 101301.
Gunderson, L. H., and Holling, C. S. (2002). Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press, Washington, DC.
Hamilton, S., Whitehouse, R., Brown, K., Combes, P., Herring, E., and Thomas, M. S. (2006). Phenomenology in practice: Towards a methodology for a “subjective” approach. European Journal of Archaeology 9: 31–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461957107077704
Harris, M. (1966). The cultural ecology of India’s sacred cattle. Current Anthropology 7: 51–66.
Hartmann, S. (1996). The world as a process: Simulations in the natural and social sciences. Modelling and Simulation in the Social Sciences from the Philosophy of Science Point of View, pp. 77–100.
Hegmon, M. (2003). Setting theoretical egos aside: Issues and theory in North American archaeology. American Antiquity 68: 213–243.
Hodder, I. (2016). Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement. Retrieved from http://www.ian-hodder.com/books/studies-human-thing-entanglement.
Hoefer, C. (2003). Causal determinism. In Zalta, E. N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/Entries/determinism-causal/
Hofmann, M., Palii, J., and Mihelcic, G. (2011). Epistemic and normative aspects of ontologies in modelling and simulation. Journal of Simulation 5: 135–146.
Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4: 1–23.
Hooper, P. L., Kaplan, H. S. and Boone, J. L. (2010). A theory of leadership in human cooperative groups. Journal of Theoretical Biology 265: 633–646.
Ingold, T. (1993). The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology 25: 152–174.
Iovita, R., Braun, D. R., Douglass, M. J., Holdaway, S. J., Lin, S. C., Olszewski, D. I., and Rezek, Z. (2021). Operationalizing niche construction theory with stone tools. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 30: 28–39. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21881
Jackson, J. B. (2005). Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Jacobson, M. J. (2022). Archaeological evidence for community resilience and sustainability: A bibliometric and quantitative review. Sustainability 14: article 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416591
Jazwa, C. S., Kennett, D. J., Winterhalder, B., and Joslin, T. L. (2017). Territoriality and the rise of despotic social organization on western Santa Rosa Island, California. Quaternary International 518: 41–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2017.11.009
Johnson, G. A. (1981) Monitoring complex system integration and boundary phenomena with settlement size data. In van der Leeuw, S. (ed.) Archaeological Approaches to the Study of Complexity, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, pp. 144–189.
Johnson, G. A. (1982). Organizational structure and scalar stress. In Rowlands, M. J., Segraves, B. A., and Renfrew, C. (eds.), Theory and Explanation in Archaeology: The Southampton Conference, Academic Press, New York, pp. 389-421.
Jones, C. G., Lawton, J. H., and Shachak, M. (1994). Organisms as ecosystem engineers. In Samson, F. S., and Knopf, F. L. (eds.), Ecosystem Management, Springer, Copenhagen, pp. 130–147.
Kauffman, S. (1995). At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, New York.
Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J., Ebi, K. L., Gibbins, G., Kohler, T. A., et al. (2022). Climate endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119: e2108146119.
Kintigh, K. W., Altschul, J. H., Beaudry, M. C., Drennan, R. D., Kinzig, A. P., Kohler, T. A., et al. (2014). Grand challenges for archaeology. American Antiquity 79: 5–24. https://doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.1.5
Knappett, C. (2011). An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society, Oxford University Press, New York.
Kohl, P. (1987). The ancient economy, transferable technologies and the Bronze Age world-system: A view from the northeastern frontier of the ancient Near East. In Rowlands, M., Larsen, M., and Kristiansen, K. (eds.), Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 13–24.
Kohler, T. A. (2012). Complex systems and archaeology. In Hodder, I. (ed.), Archaeological Theory Today, 2nd ed., Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 93–123.
Kohler, T. A., Cockburn, D., Hooper, P. L., Bocinsky, R. K., and Kobti, Z. (2012). The coevolution of group size and leadership: An agent-based public goods model for prehispanic Pueblo societies. Advances in Complex Systems 15: 115007. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219525911003256.
Kohler, T. A., Bird, D., and Wolpert, D. H. (2022). Social scale and collective computation: Does information processing limit rate of growth in scale? Journal of Social Computing 3: 1–17.
Kohler, T. A., and Gumerman, G. J. (eds.) (2000). Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies: Agent-Based Modeling of Social and Spatial Processes, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Kosse, K. (2000). Some regularities in human group formation and the evolution of societal complexity. Complexity 6: 60–64.
Kretzschmar, W. A. (2015). Language and Complex Systems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ladyman, J., Lambert, J., and Wiesner, K. (2013). What is a complex system? European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3: 33–67.
Laflin, S. (ed.) (1982). Computer Applications in Archaeology, Centre for Computing and Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Laland, K. N., and O’Brien, M. J. (2010). Niche construction theory and archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17: 303–322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-010-9096-6
Lansing, J. S. (2003). Complex adaptive systems. Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093440
Lansing, J. S., and Cox, M. P. (2019). Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Larsen-Freeman, D., and Cameron, L. (2008). Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
LeFebvre, M. J., Erlandson, J. M., and Fitzpatrick, S. M. (2022). Archaeology as sustainability science: Perspectives from ancient island societies. Sustainability 14: 9689. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159689
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1944). The social and psychological aspect of chieftainship in a primitive tribe: The Nambikuara of northwestern Mato Grosso. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 7: 16–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2164-0947.1944.tb00171.x
Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology, Basic Book Publishers, New York.
Lévi-Strauss, C., and Needham, R. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Alden Press, Oxford.
Levy, D. (1994). Chaos theory and strategy: Theory, application, and managerial implications. Strategic Management Journal 15: 167–178. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250151011
Lobo, J., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Strumsky, D., and West, G. B. (2013). Urban scaling and the production function for cities. PLoS ONE 8: e58407. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0058407
Lobo, J., Bettencourt, L. M., Smith, M. E., and Ortman, S. (2020). Settlement scaling theory: Bridging the study of ancient and contemporary urban systems. Urban Studies 57: 731–747. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019873796
Lobo, J., Whitelaw, T., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Wiessner, P., Smith, M. E., and Ortman, S. (2022). Scaling of hunter-gatherer camp size and human sociality. Current Anthropology 63: 68–94. https://doi.org/10.1086/719234
Lock, G. (2003). Using Computers in Archaeology: Towards Virtual Pasts, Routledge, New York.
Lorenz, E. N. (1963). Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of Atmospheric Sciences 20: 130–141.
Lowie, R. H. (1948). Some aspects of political organization among the American Aborigines. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 78: 11. https://doi.org/10.2307/2844522
Lyman, R. L., O’Brien, M. J., and Dunnell, R. C. (1997). The Rise and Fall of Culture History, Plenum, New York.
MacArthur, R. H., and Pianka, E. R. (1966). On optimal use of a patchy environment. The American Naturalist 100: 603–609. https://doi.org/10.1086/282454
Maldonado, C., and Mezza-Garcia, N. (2016). Anarchy and complexity. Emergence: Complexity and Organization 18: 1–13.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, George Routlege and Sons, London.
Malinowski, B. (1945). The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Marsh, E. J. (2015). The emergence of agropastoralism: Accelerated ecocultural change on the Andean altiplano, ∼3540–3120 cal BP. Environmental Archaeology 20: 13–29. https://doi.org/10.1179/1749631414Y.0000000036
Martini, G., Bracci, A., Riches, L., Jaiswal, S., Corea, M., Rivers, J., Husain, A., and Omodei, E. (2022). Machine learning can guide food security efforts when primary data are not available. Nature Food 3: 716–728.
Marx, K., and Engels, F. (1970). The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur, International, New York.
Mauss, M. (1990). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, W. W. Norton, London.
McCulloch, W. S. (1945). A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 7: 89–93.
McElreath, R. (2020). Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and STAN, 2nd ed., CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
McGuire, R. H. (1983). Breaking down cultural complexity: Inequality and heterogeneity. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 6: 91–142.
McGuire, R. H., and Saitta, D. J. (1996). Although they have petty captains, they obey them badly: The dialectics of prehispanic Western Pueblo social organization. American Antiquity 61: 197–216. https://doi.org/10.2307/282418
McLaughlin, P. (2007). Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism, Ashgate Publishing Group, New York.
Meggers, B. J. (1960). The law of cultural evolution as a practical research tool. In Carneiro, R. L. (ed.), Essays in the Science of Culture, Thomas Crowell, New York, pp. 302–316.
Mills, B. J. (2017). Social network analysis in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 46: 379–397. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041423
Mitchell, M. (2009). Complexity: A guided tour. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Mitchell, M., Crutchfield, J. P., and Hraber, P. T. (1994). Dynamics, computation, and the “edge of chaos": A re-examination. In Cowan, G., Pines, D., and Melzner, D. (eds.), Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, pp. 497-513
Mitchell, M., and Hofstadter, D. R. (1990). The emergence of understanding in a computer model of concepts and analogy-making. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 42: 322–334.
Mohlenhoff, K. A., and Codding, B. F. (2017). When does it pay to invest in a patch? The evolution of intentional niche construction. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 26: 218–227. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21534
Moonkham, P., Srinurak, N., and Duff, A. I. (2023). The heterarchical life and spatial analyses of the historical Buddhist temples in the Chiang Saen Basin, northern Thailand. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 70: 101506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101506
Moran, E. F. (1990). The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology: From Concept to Practice, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Morrison, K. (2008). Educational philosophy and the challenge of complexity theory. Educational Philosophy and Theory 40: 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00394.x
Newman, M. (2005). Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law. Contemporary Physics 46: 323–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107510500052444
Nicholas, G. P. (2008). Native peoples and archaeology. In Pearsall, D. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol. 3, Academic Press, New York, pp. 1660–1669.
Nicoll, K., and Zerboni, A. (2020). Is the past key to the present? Observations of cultural continuity and resilience reconstructed from geoarchaeological records. Quaternary International 545: 119–127.
Nowak, M. A., and Krakauer, D. C. (1999). The evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96: 8028–8033.
O’Brien, S. (2017). Boredom with the apocalypse: Resilience, regeneration, and their consequences for archaeological interpretation. In Cunningham, T., and Driessen, J. (eds.), Crisis to Collapse: The Archaeology of Social Breakdown, Louvain University Press, Louvain, pp. 295–303.
O’Connell, J. F., and Hawkes, K. (1981). Alyawara plant use and optimal foraging theory. In Winterhalder, B., and Smith, E. A. (eds.), Hunter-Gatherer Foraging Strategies: Ethnographic and Archaeological Analyses, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 99–125.
Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., and Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Oka, R. C., Kissel, M., Golitko, M., Sheridan, S. G., Kim, N. C., and Fuentes, A. (2017). Population is the main driver of war group size and conflict casualties. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114: E11101–E11110. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713972114
Omodei, E., Garcia-Herranz, M., Paolotti, D., and Tizzoni, M. (2022). Complex systems for the most vulnerable. Journal of Physics: Complexity 3: 021001.
O’Reilly, D. W. (2003). Further evidence of heterarchy in Bronze Age Thailand. Current Anthropology 44: 300–306.
Ortman, S. G., Cabaniss, A. H. F., Sturm, J. O., and Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2014). The pre-history of urban scaling. PLoS ONE 9: e87902. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087902
Ortman, S. G., and Coffey, G. D. (2017). Settlement scaling in middle-range societies. American Antiquity 82: 662–682. https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2017.42
Ortman, S. G., Lobo, J., and Smith, M. E. (2020). Cities: Complexity, theory and history. PLoS ONE 15: e0243621. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243621
Ortner, S. B. (1984). Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 126–166.
Ortner, S. B. (2016). Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6: 47–73.
Östborn, P., and Gerding, H. (2014). Network analysis of archaeological data: A systematic approach. Journal of Archaeological Science 46: 75–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.015
Otárola-Castillo, E. R., Torquato, M. G., Wolfhagen, J., Hill, M. E., and Buck, C. E. (2022). Beyond chronology, using Bayesian inference to evaluate hypotheses in archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice 10: 397–413. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2022.10
Otárola-Castillo, E., and Torquato, M. G. (2018). Bayesian statistics in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 435–453.
Palacios, O., and Barceló, J. A. (2023). Causal networks and complex systems in archaeology. Research Square preprint. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2673322/v1
Patterson, T. C. (2004). Social archaeology and Marxist social thought. In Meskell, L., and Preucel, R. W. (eds.), A Companion to Social Archaeology, Blackwell, Malden, pp. 66–81.
Peeples, M. A. (2019). Finding a place for networks in archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Research 27: 451–499. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-019-09127-8
Peeples, M. A., and Roberts, J. M. (2013). To binarize or not to binarize: Relational data and the construction of archaeological networks. Journal of Archaeological Science 40: 3001–3010. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.03.014
Petrie, C. A., Singh, R. N., Bates, J., Dixit, Y., French, C. A. I., Hodell, D. A., et al. (2017). Adaptation to variable environments, resilience to climate change: Investigating land, water and settlement in Indus northwest India. Current Anthropology 58: 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1086/690112
Phillips, P., Ford, J. A., and Griffin, J. B. (1951). Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940–1947, Papers No. 25, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.
Pisor, A. C., and Jones, J. H. (2021). Do people manage climate risk through long-distance relationships? American Journal of Human Biology 33: e23525.
Pisor, A. C., and Ross, C. T. (2022). Distinguishing intergroup and long-distance relationships. Human Nature 33: 280–303.
Polla, S., and Verhagen, P. (eds.) (2014). Computational Approaches to the Study of Movement in Archaeology: Theory, Practice and Interpretation of Factors and Effects of Long Term Landscape Formation and Transformation, De Gruyter, Berlin.
Preiser, R., Biggs, R., De Vos, A., and Folke, C. (2018). Social-ecological systems as complex adaptive systems: Organizing principles for advancing research methods and approaches. Ecology and Society 23: article 46. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10558-230446
Premo, L. S., and Scholnick, J. B. (2011). The spatial scale of social learning affects cultural diversity. American Antiquity 76: 163–176.
Price, B. J. (1982). Cultural materialism: A theoretical review. American Antiquity 47: 709–741.
Price, T. D., and Brown, J. A. (1987). Prehistoric Hunter‐Gatherers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity. Academic Press, Orlando.
Quintus, S., and Allen, M. S. (2023). Niche construction and long-term trajectories of food production. Journal of Archaeological Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-023-09187-x
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1924). The mother’s brother in South Africa. South African Journal of Science 21: 542–555.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1952). Structure and Function, Free Press, Glencoe.
Ramenofsky, A. F. (1982). The Archaeology of Population Collapse: Native American Response to the Introduction of Infectious Disease, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle.
Rappaport, R. (1971). Nature, culture and ecological anthropology. In Shapiro, H. (ed.), Man, Culture, and Society, Oxford University Press, New York.
Razanatsoa, E., Andriantsaralaza, S., Holmes, S. M., Rakotonarivo, O. S., Ratsifandrihamanana, A. N., Randriamiharisoa, L., et al. (2021). Fostering local involvement for biodiversity conservation in tropical regions: Lessons from Madagascar during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Biotropica 53: 994–1003. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.12967
Ready, E., and Price, M. H. (2021). Human behavioral ecology and niche construction. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 30: 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21885
Redman, C. L. (2005). Resilience theory in archaeology. American Anthropologist 107: 70–77.
Redman, C. L., and Kinzig, A. P. (2003). Resilience of past landscapes: Resilience theory, society, and the longue durée. Conservation Ecology 7: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26271922
Renfrew, C. (1972). The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium BC, Methuen, London.
Reynolds, J., and Lewis, S. (2019). Ethnography and evaluation: Temporalities of complex systems and methodological complexity. Anthropology & Medicine 26: 1–17.
Richardson, K. A. (2004). Systems theory and complexity: Part 1. Emergence: Complexity and Organization 6: 75–80.
Rick, T. C., Alsharekh, A. M., Braje, T. J., Crowther, A., Erlandson, J. M., Fuller, D. Q., et al. (2022). Coring, profiling, and trenching: Archaeological field strategies for investigating the Pleistocene-Holocene-Anthropocene continuum. Quaternary International 628: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.02.011
Ritchison, B. T., Thompson, V. D., Lulewicz, I., Tucker, B., and Turck, J. A. (2020). Climate change, resilience, and the native American fisher-hunter-gatherers of the Late Holocene on the Georgia coast, USA. Quaternary International 584: 82–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.08.030
Robinson, E., Zahid, H. J., Codding, B. F., Haas, R., and Kelly, R. L. (2019). Spatiotemporal dynamics of prehistoric human population growth: Radiocarbon ‘dates as data’ and population ecology models. Journal of Archaeological Science 101: 63–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2018.11.006
Rodin, M., Michaelson, K., Britan, G. M., De Ruijter, A., Dow, J., Espínola, J. C., et al. (1978). Systems theory in anthropology [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology 19: 747–762. https://doi.org/10.1086/202196
Romanowska, I., Crabtree, S. A., Harris, K., and Davies, B. (2019). Agent-based modeling for archaeologists: Part 1 of 3. Advances in Archaeological Practice 7: 178–184. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2019.6
Romanowska, I., Wren, C. D., and Crabtree, S. A. (2021). Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeology: Simulating the Complexity of Societies, Santa Fe Institute Press, Santa Fe.
Roseberry, W. (1997). Marx and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 25–46.
Rubio-Campillo, X., Coto-Sarmiento, M., Pérez-Gonzalez, J., and Rodríguez, J. R. (2017). Bayesian analysis and free market trade within the Roman Empire. Antiquity 91: 1241–1252.
Sahlins, M. D. (1958). Social Stratification in Polynesia, University of Washington Press, Seattle.
Sanger, M. C. (2023). Anarchy, institutional flexibility, and containment of authority at Poverty Point (USA). World Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2023.2169339
Sawyer, R.K. (2001). Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory. American Journal of Sociology 107: 551–585.
Sawyer, R.K. (2004). The Mechanisms of Emergence. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34: 260– 282.
Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Schläpfer, M., Bettencourt, L. M. A., Grauwin, S., Raschke, M., Claxton, R., Smoreda, Z., West, G. B., and Ratti, C. (2014). The scaling of human interactions with city size. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 11: 20130789. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0789
Scott, J. C. (1976). The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Scott, J. C. (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Service, E. R. (1962). Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, Random House, New York.
Shanks, M., and Tilley, C. (1989). Archaeology into the 1990s. Norwegian Archaeological Review 22: 1–54.
Shennan, S. (2002). Genes, Memes and Human History, Thames and Hudson, London.
Shin, J., Price, M. H., Wolpert, D. H., Shimao, H., Tracey, B., and Kohler, T. A. (2020). Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution. Nature Communications 11: 2394. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16035-9
Silva, F., Coward, F., Davies, K., Elliott, S., Jenkins, E., Newton, A. C., et al. (2022). Developing transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability challenges: The need to model socio-environmental systems in the longue durée. Sustainability 14: 10234. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610234
Smith, C. E., and Flannery, K. V. (1986). Guilá Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico, Academic Press, New York.
Smith, E. A., Bettinger, R. L., Bishop, C. A., Blundell, V., Cashdan, E., Casimir, M. J., et al. (1983). Anthropological applications of optimal foraging theory: A critical review [and comments and reply]. Current Anthropology 24: 625–651. https://doi.org/10.1086/203066
Smith, M. E. (2019). Energized crowding and the generative role of settlement aggregation and urbanization. In Gyucha, A. (ed.), Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 37–58.
Smith, M. E. (2021). Why archaeology’s relevance to global challenges has not been recognised. Antiquity 95: 1061–1069. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.42
Spencer, H. (1860). The social organism. Westminster Review 73: 90–121.
Spengler, R. N. (2021). Niche construction theory in archaeology: A critical review. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 28: 925–955. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09528-4
Squitieri, A., and Altaweel, M. (2022). Empires and the acceleration of wealth inequality in the pre-Islamic Near East: An archaeological approach. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 14: 190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-022-01659-3
Stauffer, D. (1979). Scaling theory of percolation clusters. Physics Reports 54: 1–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/0370-1573(79)90060-7
Stein, G. J. (1998). Heterogeneity, power, and political economy: Some current research issues in the archaeology of Old World complex societies. Journal of Archaeological Research 6: 1–44.
Steward, J. (1955). The concept and method of cultural ecology; excerpt from Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. In Haenn, N., and Wilk, R. (eds.), Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History, New York University Press, New York, pp. 5–9.
Steward, J. H., and Setzler, F. M. (1938). Function and configuration in archaeology. American Antiquity 4: 4–10. https://doi.org/10.2307/275356
Stiner, M. C., and Kuhn, S. L. (2016). Are we missing the “sweet spot” between optimality theory and niche construction theory in archaeology? Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 44: 177–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2016.07.006
Strawhacker, C., Snitker, G., Peeples, M. A., Kinzig, A. P., Kintigh, K. W., Bocinsky, K., et al. (2020). A landscape perspective on climate-driven risks to food security: Exploring the relationship between climate and social transformation in the prehispanic US Southwest. American Antiquity 85: 427–451. https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2020.35
Supernant, K., and Warrick, G. (2014). Challenges to critical community-based archaeological practice in Canada. Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien d’Archéologie 38: 563–591.
Sundstrom, S. M., and Allen, C. R. (2019). The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor. Ecological Complexity 39: 100767.
Sundstrom, S. M., Angeler, D. G., Bell, J., Hayes, M., Hodbod, J., Jalalzadeh-Fard, B., et al. (2023). Panarchy theory for convergence. Sustainability Science: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01299-z
Tainter, J. A. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press.
Tainter, J. A. (2014). Collapse and sustainability: Rome, the Maya, and the modern world. Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 24: 201–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/apaa.12038
Tattersall, I. (2008). An evolutionary framework for the acquisition of symbolic cognition by Homo sapiens. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews 3: 99–114. https://doi.org/10.3819/ccbr.2008.30006
Thakar, H., and Fernandez, C. F. (eds.) (2023). Human Behavioral Ecology in Coastal Environments, University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
Thomas, D. H. (1972). A computer simulation model of Great Basin Shoshonean subsistence and settlement patterns. Models in Archaeology, Methuen, London, pp. 671–704.
Thomas, D. H. (1973). An empirical test for Steward’s model of Great Basin settlement patterns. American Antiquity 38: 155–176.
Thompson, V. D., and Turck, J. A. (2009). Adaptive cycles of coastal hunter-gatherers. American Antiquity 74: 255–278.
Tilley, C. (1994). A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments, Berg, Oxford.
Trigger, B. G. (2006). A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Turchin, P., Whitehouse, H., Korotayev, A., Francois, P., Hoyer, D., Peregrine, P., et al. (2018). Evolutionary Pathways to Statehood: Old Theories and New Data. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/h7tr6
Turck, J. A., and Thompson, V. D. (2016). Revisiting the resilience of Late Archaic hunter-gatherers along the Georgia coast. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 43: 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2016.05.006
Turner, J. R., and Baker, R. M. (2019). Complexity theory: An overview with potential applications for the social sciences. Systems 7: article 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems7010004
Ullah, I. I. T., Chang, C., and Tourtellotte, P. (2019). Water, dust, and agro-pastoralism: Modeling socio-ecological co-evolution of landscapes, farming, and human society in southeast Kazakhstan during the mid to late Holocene. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 55: 101067. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2019.101067
Van Noorden, R. (2015). Interdisciplinary research by the numbers. Nature 525: article 7569. https://doi.org/10.1038/525306a
van Strien, M. (2021). Was physics ever deterministic? The historical basis of determinism and the image of classical physics. The European Physical Journal H 46: 1–20.
Walker, B., Holling, C. S., Carpenter, S. R., and Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9: 5 [online]. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/
Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System I Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Academic Press, New York.
Wasserman, S., and Faust, K. (1994). Social Network Analysis. Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Watson, P. J., LeBlanc, S. A., and Redman, C. L. (1971). Explanation in Archeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach, Columbia University Press, New York.
Weart, S. (2013). Rise of interdisciplinary research on climate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110: 3657–3664.
Weiberg, E. (2012). What can resilience theory do for (Aegean) archaeology? In Burström, N. M., and Fahlander, F. (eds.), Matters of Scale: Processes and Courses of Events in Archaeology and Cultural History, Stockholm University, Stockholm, pp. 147–165.
Wernke, S. A. (2022). Explosive expansion, sociotechnical diversity, and fragile sovereignty in the domain of the Inka. Journal of Social Computing 3: 57–74.
West, G. B. (1984). Scale and dimension — From animals to quarks. Los Alamos Science 11: 2
West, G. (2017). Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, Penguin, New York.
Westerman, K., Oleson, K. L., and Harris, A. (2012). The role of community-based coastal conservation and development initiatives in building social-ecological resilience to climate change: Experiences from southern Madagascar. Western Indian Ocean Journal of Marine Science 11: 87–97.
White, L. A. (1988). The symbol: The origin and basis of human behavior and energy and the evolution of culture. In Bohannan, P., and Glazer, M. (eds.), High Points in Anthropology, 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 333–355.
Winterhalder, B. (1981). Optimal foraging strategies and hunter-gatherer research in anthropology: Theory and models. In Winterhalder, B., and Smith, E. A. (eds.), Hunter-Gatherer Foraging Strategies: Ethnographic and Archaeological Analyses, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 13–35.
Winterhalder, B., Kennett, D. J., Grote, M. N., and Bartruff, J. (2010). Ideal free settlement of California’s Northern Channel Islands. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29: 469–490. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2010.07.001
Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Wren, C. D., Janssen, M. A., Hill, K., and Marean, C. W. (2023). What makes a forager turn coastal? In Thakar, H., and Fernandez, C. F. (eds.), Human Behavioral Ecology in Coastal Environments, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, pp. 172–198.
Xu, C., Kohler, T. A., Lenton, T. M., Svenning, J.-C., and Scheffer, M. (2020). Future of the human climate niche. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117: 11350–11355. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
Yawson, R. M. (2013). Systems theory and thinking as a foundational theory in human resource development—A myth or reality? Human Resource Development Review 12: 53–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484312461634
Zeder, M. A. (2016). Domestication as a model system for niche construction theory. Evolutionary Ecology 30: 325–348. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-015-9801-8
Bibliography of Recent Literature
An, L. (2012). Modeling human decisions in coupled human and natural systems: Review of agent-based models. Ecological Modelling 229: 25–36.
Anderson, K., Salvador, T., and Barnett, B. (2013). Models in motion: Ethnography moves from complicatedness to complex systems. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2013: 232–249.
Arrow, H., and Henry, K. B. (2019). Complex dynamics in small groups. In Yordanov Georgiev, G., Smart, J. M., Flores Martinez, C. L., and Price, M. E. (eds.), Evolution, Development and Complexity: Multiscale Evolutionary Models of Complex Adaptive Systems, Cham, pp. 403–420.
Artime, O., and De Domenico, M. (2022). From the origin of life to pandemics: Emergent phenomena in complex systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 380: 20200410.
Barceló, J. A., and Del Castillo, F. (eds.) (2016). Simulating Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds, Springer, Cham.
Becker, J. (2018). Living and artificial systems: Toward an anthropology of complex systems. Presented at Conférence Annuelle de l'IRIS, 8-9 November, Paris.
Bradtmöller, M., Pastoors, A., Weninger, B., and Weniger, G. C. (2012). The repeated replacement model—Rapid climate change and population dynamics in Late Pleistocene Europe. Quaternary International 247: 38–49.
Brughmans, T., Hanson, J., Mandich, M., Romanowska, I., Rubio-Campillo, X., Carrignon, S., et al. (2019). Formal modelling approaches to complexity science in Roman studies: A manifesto. Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 2: 1–19. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/traj.367
Brughmans, T., and Peeples, M. (2023). Network Science in Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Byrne, D. (2023). Causation in complex systems where human agency is in play. International Journal of Social Research Methodology. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2023.2173845
Crabtree, S. A., Kahn, J. G., Jackson, R., Wood, S. A., McKechnie, I., Verhagen, P., et al. (2016). Modelling the palimpsest: An exploratory agent-based model of surface archaeological deposit formation in a fluvial arid Australian landscape. Holocene 26: 450–463.
Dugmore, A. J. (2023). Why are sustainable practices often elusive? The role of information flow in the management of networked human-environment interactions. Global Environmental Change 78: 102597.
Davis, D. S., and Douglass, K. (2021). Remote sensing reveals lasting legacies of land-use by small-scale communities in the southwestern Indian Ocean. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9: 689399. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.689399
DeMarrais, E. (2016). Making pacts and cooperative acts: The archaeology of coalition and consensus. World Archaeology 48: 1–13.
Ellyson, L. J. (2022). Applying Gregory Johnson's concepts of scalar stress to scale and information thresholds in Holocene social evolution. Journal of Social Computing 3: 38–56.
Ervin, A. M. (2015). Cultural Transformations and Globalization: Theory, Development, and Social Change, Routledge, New York.
Feinman, G. M., and Carballo, D. M. (2022). Communication, computation, and governance: A multiscalar vantage on the prehispanic Mesoamerican world. Journal of Social Computing 3: 91–118.
Fitzhugh, B., Gjesfjeld, E. W., Brown, W. A., Hudson, M. J., and Shaw, J. D. (2016). Resilience and the population history of the Kuril Islands, Northwest Pacific: A study in complex human ecodynamics. Quaternary International 419: 165–193.
Froese, T., and Manzanilla, L. R. (2018). Modeling collective rule at ancient Teotihuacan as a complex adaptive system: Communal ritual makes social hierarchy more effective. Cognitive Systems Research 52: 862–874.
Gavrilets, S., Auerbach, J., and Van Vugt, M. (2016). Convergence to consensus in heterogeneous groups and the emergence of informal leadership. Scientific Reports 6: 1–10.
Haas Jr, W. R., Klink, C. J., Maggard, G. J., and Aldenderfer, M. S. (2015). Settlement-size scaling among prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlement systems in the New World. PloS One 10: e0140127.
Hamilton, M. J. (2022). Collective computation, information flow, and the emergence of hunter-gatherer small-worlds. Journal of Social Computing 3: 18–37.
Hennig, H. (2014). Synchronization in human musical rhythms and mutually interacting complex systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111: 12974–12979.
Hooper, P. L., Smith, E., Kohler, T, Wright, H. T., and Kaplan, H. S. 2015. Ecological and social dynamics of territoriality and hierarchy formation. In Sabloff, J. A. (ed.), Principles of Complexity: An Introduction to Complex Adaptive Systems and Human Society, Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 105–130.
Isendahl, C., and Stump, D. (eds.) (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Historical Ecology and Applied Archaeology, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Kohler, T. A., and van der Leeuw, S. E. (eds.) (2007). The Model-Based Archaeology of Socionatural Systems, School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM.
Kluiving, S. J., and Hamel, A. (2016). How can archaeology help us unravel the Anthropocene? RCC Perspectives 5: 55–62.
Kondor, D., Bennett, J. S., Gronenborn, D., Antunes, N., Hoyer, D., and Turchin, P. (2023). Explaining population booms and busts in mid-Holocene Europe. Scientific Reports 13: 9310
Ladyman, J., and Wiesner, K. (2020). What is a Complex System? Yale University Press, New Haven.
Lansing, J. S., and de Vet, T. (2018). Social-ecological systems. In Callan, H. (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ, pp. 1–3.
Lansing, J. S., Thurner, S., Chung, N. N., Coudurier-Curveur, A., Karakaş, Ç., Fesenmyer, K. A., and Chew, L. Y. (2017). Adaptive self-organization of Bali’s ancient rice terraces. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114: 6504–6509.
Llano, C., de Porras, M. E., Barberena, R., Timpson, A., Beltrame, M. O., and Marsh, E. J. (2020). Human resilience to Holocene climate changes inferred from rodent middens in drylands of northwestern Patagonia (Argentina). Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 557: 109894.
Marsh, E. J. (2016). The disappearing desert and the emergence of agropastoralism: An adaptive cycle of rapid change in the mid-Holocene Lake Titicaca basin (Peru–Bolivia). Quaternary International 422: 123–134.
Miller, J. H., and Page, S. E. (2009). Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Ortman, S. G., Smith, M. E., Lobo, J., and Bettencourt, L. M. (2020). Why archaeology is necessary for a theory of urbanization. Journal of Urban Archaeology 1: 151–167.
Penny, D., Zachreson, C., Fletcher, R., Lau, D., Lizier, J. T., Fischer, N., et al. (2018). The demise of Angkor: Systemic vulnerability of urban infrastructure to climatic variations. Science Advances 4: p.eaau4029.
Rezek, Z., Holdaway, S. J., Olszewski, D. I., Lin, S. C., Douglass, M., McPherron, S. P., et al. (2020). Aggregates, formational emergence, and the focus on practice in stone artifact archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 27: 887–928.
Robert, S. (2021). Résilience et paysage: L’utilisation de la resilience theory en archéologie du paysage et en archéogéographie. Archéologie, Société et Environnement 2(1): article 1.
Root, H. L. (2020). Networking History: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Siegenfeld, A. F., and Bar-Yam, Y. (2020). An introduction to complex systems science and its applications. Complexity 2020: 1–16.
Silva, F., Stevens, C. J., Weisskopf, A., Castillo, C., Qin, L., Bevan, A., and Fuller, D. Q. (2015). Modelling the geographical origin of rice cultivation in Asia using the rice archaeological database. PloS One 10: e0137024.
Smith, C. L., Lopes, V. L., and Carrejo, F. M. (2011). Recasting paradigm shift: "True" sustainability and complex systems. Human Ecology Review 18: 67–74.
Støttrup, J. G., Dinesen, G. E., Schumacher, J., Gillgren, C., Inácio, M., and Schernewski, G. (2019). The systems approach framework for collaborative, science-based management of complex systems. Journal of Coastal Conservation 23: 881–898.
Tainter, J. A. (2018). Introduction: Prehistoric societies as evolving complex systems. In Tainter, J. A., and Tainter, B. B. (eds.), Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest, CRC Press, Boca Raton, pp. 1–24.
Thurner, S., Hanel, R., and Klimek, P. (2018). Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Turchin, P., Currie, T. E., Whitehouse, H., François, P., Feeney, K., Mullins, D., et al. (2018). Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115: E144–E151.
Tverskoi, D., Senthilnathan, A., and Gavrilets, S. (2021). The dynamics of cooperation, power, and inequality in a group-structured society. Scientific Reports 11: 18670.
Widlok, T., Aufgebauer, A., Bradtmöller, M., Dikau, R., Hoffmann, T., Kretschmer, I., et al. (2012). Towards a theoretical framework for analyzing integrated socio-environmental systems. Quaternary International 274: 259–272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2012.01.020
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship (SMA-2203789). The author wishes to thank Gary Feinman and the editorial board of Journal of Archaeological Research and the seven anonymous peer reviewers whose constructive feedback greatly improved an earlier version of this article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Davis, D.S. Past, Present, and Future of Complex Systems Theory in Archaeology. J Archaeol Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-023-09193-z
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-023-09193-z