Publisher's Synopsis
This book is part of a major series of more than 20 volumes resulting from the World Archaeological Congress held in Southampton in September 1986. Global archaeology was addressed as an approach to the investigation of not only how people lived in the past, but also how and why changes took place, resulting in the forms of society and culture which exist today.;The papers in this volume address comparative studies in the development of complex societies. Lecturers took as their starting point the assumption that the concept of social complexity, as a parochial approach to the past, which simply assumed a European development to urbanization as the valid criterion for defining a complex society, totally ignored the complexity of non-literate civilizations such as the Inca of Peru or the Benin in Nigeria and must be re-examined and redefined.
