You’re walking through Teotihuacan in Mexico, dwarfed by massive pyramids, looking for the king — the ruler powerful enough to command all that labor. Archaeologists haven’t found one: no lavish royal tombs, no clear dynastic ruler. That absence is where the anthropology of social complexity begins, because it forces a question we rarely notice we’re asking: do cities require kings? This lecture, chapter 8.3 of The Human Story in Introduction to Anthropology, examines how human societies grow complex and how power gets organized — part of the site’s Power Analysis hub. It follows the agricultural transition and leads into economic anthropology.
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Key Concepts
- Teotihuacan’s massive pyramids show no clear evidence of a king — no lavish royal tombs, no single dynastic ruler — which undercuts the assumption that monumental architecture requires centralized, despotic rule.
- Agriculture is not automatically an improvement on foraging: early farmers often show worse height and nutrition than nearby hunter-gatherers, and more farming generally meant more work.
- Bands, tribes, and chiefdoms are organizational labels, not evolutionary stages — societies move between them, sometimes seasonally (more hierarchical in summer, more egalitarian in winter), and the sequence does not run one way (236).
- There is no universal cause of cities and states: irrigation theory and circumscription theory each fit some cases but not others, and archaeologists have “moved away from large, universal theories toward more nuanced investigations” (235).
- Social stratification is read archaeologically from burials — a child buried with jewels signals inherited status — and from craft specialization; it is associated with, but not exclusive to, agriculture (236).
- The largest wealth disparities correlate with large draft animals (cattle, horses) domesticated across Eurasia — an observation the textbook offers and the lecture treats as suggestive, not settled (237).
- Complexity is not one-directional: living in a complex society can make an individual life simpler, and the more complex a tool is, the less embodied skill it demands — the lasso versus the iPhone (237–239).
- Complex societies keep order through formal laws but also through informal norms and informal justice — shaming, sanction, gossip, exclusion — that operate outside the state (240, 243).
Questioning Deep Assumptions
What if some of what you learned about “primitive” hunter-gatherers and “advanced” civilizations is wrong? For roughly 400 to 500 years, certain assumptions about human societies have become so embedded in our thinking that we don’t even notice them anymore. They’re “things we swim with” — appearing in movies, shaping tourism expectations, and influencing how we imagine human possibilities. Studying social complexity in anthropology is not just learning how human societies organize themselves; it means challenging some of the deepest assumptions we hold about human history. For how Western thought positions hunter-gatherers as an “absolute zero” of culture, Tim Ingold develops the point in hunter-gatherer mythology.
The Teotihuacan Puzzle
Imagine you’re visiting Teotihuacan in Mexico, walking among those massive pyramids. Who are you looking for? Most visitors are searching for the king — the powerful ruler who could command people to build such monuments. During colonization, Europeans arrived demanding “take me to your leader, take me to your king,” because they assumed all societies required centralized governance to function.
Here’s the striking thing: archaeologists haven’t found clear evidence of a king at Teotihuacan. No lavish royal tombs like those documented in Maya cities, no clear indicators of individual dynastic rulers. While some scholars argue for collective rulership or less visible centralized authority, the structures appear to have been built through complex organization rather than despotic authority under a single king. The Aztecs gave the site the name we use — Teotihuacan — long after it was abandoned; we don’t know what its builders called it.
Recent archaeological work suggests they built not just pyramids but an enormously successful housing complex, without huge inequalities and without centralized government. The more we dig, the less these old assumptions hold up against the new evidence. This absence forces a crucial question: do cities require kings? David Graeber and David Wengrow pursue exactly this question across human history in the course on The Dawn of Everything.
Deep Assumptions About Human History
Agriculture, Civilization, and “Wild Men”
Another deep assumption pervades our thinking: that agriculture is always better than hunting and gathering. You can see it embedded in the terminology — “agriculture” contains the word “culture,” which historically signaled being civilized, being above others. Not long ago we didn’t even use the term “hunter-gatherers”; we called people “savages” or “wild men,” imagining them running through jungles like animals.
The idea was clear: agriculture brings civilization and all the benefits we enjoy today. But as we discussed with the health consequences of early agriculture, the archaeological evidence tells a more complicated story. Early farmers often experienced worse health outcomes — worse height, worse nutrition — than their hunter-gatherer neighbors. It is only in recent years, and only in some societies, that we’ve had enough food to go around. Encountering evidence that agriculture wasn’t always advantageous can be unsettling precisely because it contradicts a deeply held prejudice about human progress.
The Assumption of Inevitable Complexity and Hierarchy
We also carry assumptions about complexity itself — the pervasive idea that human societies are always getting more complex, always progressing forward. This assumption even shapes how we think about biological evolution: we assume more complex organisms are “better” or “fitter.” But fitness can only be measured within a particular environment. Sometimes it’s more advantageous to be simpler, more flexible, more able to adapt — and we still live in the age of bacteria.
Connected to this is another assumption: that whenever a society gets complex, you inevitably get social inequality and hierarchy, and there’s supposedly nothing we can do about it. Maybe it’s deep psychology, maybe it’s evolution, maybe it’s just what we need to organize ourselves in groups. This is perhaps the biggest finding in Graeber and Wengrow’s conclusion on alternative historical possibilities: scale and complexity do not automatically produce hierarchy.
This ties into perhaps the deepest assumption of all, which the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes crystallized and which persists today: that without police, without a state government setting down laws, life is just the law of the jungle — everyone beating and killing each other, “the war of all against all.” Hobbes used it to argue for a strong state. For the archaeological evidence against this assumption, see warfare and agriculture.
The goal here isn’t to disprove these assumptions entirely — the evidence is mixed and human societies are enormously variable. It’s to recognize them as assumptions rather than facts. They’ve become so embedded in how we interpret archaeological sites and imagine other societies that they’re difficult to dislodge. At minimum, let’s examine them critically.
Bands, Tribes, Chiefdoms (236)
When archaeologists and anthropologists study social complexity, they often use organizational categories: bands, tribes, and chiefdoms. These appear constantly in introductory anthropology, so it’s worth understanding both what they mean technically and why they’re problematic. Hunter-gatherers are generally described as living in bands — small groups organized around kinship ties, though we now understand those ties were more flexible, mobile, and cosmopolitan than once thought, often including non-kin. Agricultural societies are often categorized as tribes, somewhat larger units. Then there are chiefdoms — hierarchical societies with chiefs who hold authority over others, often corresponding to pastoral societies.
Why These Terms Are Problematic
Here’s the complication. As the textbook notes right after introducing these categories, the relationship between these forms of organization isn’t linear. Bands don’t necessarily evolve into tribes, then chiefdoms, then states. We once thought they would, but the archaeological evidence doesn’t support it. Sometimes societies move back and forth; some alternate seasonally, looking more hierarchical in summer and more egalitarian in winter. Graeber and Wengrow develop this critique of the bands→tribes→chiefdoms→states model through seasonality and social flexibility.
The categories also don’t map neatly onto subsistence. Consider the Pacific Northwest of North America, where societies were hunter-gatherers — no agriculture — yet had settled villages, large populations, significant inequality, and even enslaved people. A hunter-gatherer society with slavery challenges the neat scheme. There can also be varying levels of complexity within each type. To be honest, I low-key hate these terms — not just because they fit the evidence poorly, but because they carry popular associations (everyone assumes a tribe has a chief) that don’t match how archaeologists use them. Used carefully, without importing assumptions about linear progression, they can still be useful for talking about the real diversity of human social organization.
How Did We Get Cities and States? (235)
If cities, states, and complex hierarchical societies don’t simply evolve from simpler forms, how did they arise? This has been one of the great debates in archaeology. (By “state,” note, we don’t mean New York State — we mean an overarching central government.)
Irrigation Theory
One early theory held that cities and states — especially despotic states — arose because of irrigation: you needed centralized authority to control the massive public works required to irrigate farmland. It’s an interesting idea, but the evidence doesn’t support it universally. There are places, such as the Andes, that organized irrigation collectively without despotic rulers, and there are powerful states without much irrigation at all.
Circumscription Theory
Another proposal the textbook mentions is circumscription theory: a concentration of resources plus population growth leads to conflict over those resources, which drives state formation. Again, this seems to apply in some regions but not others. It isn’t universal.
The Move Away from Universal Theories
Here’s the key line from the textbook: “Archaeologists have generally moved away from large, universal theories toward more nuanced investigations.” Just as we once thought agriculture emerged everywhere for the same reasons, we used to think cities and states evolved everywhere from the same causes. We’ve had to revise those grand theories in favor of specific evidence in specific cases. Teotihuacan is not the same kind of city as the Aztec Tenochtitlan, and neither is like the Maya cities or those of Mesopotamia. And cities and states don’t only rise — they fall. They come and go. This isn’t a one-way process toward ever-greater complexity.
Social Stratification: How Did We Get Divided? (236)
Social stratification is when humans are organized into levels — elites at the top, commoners and peasants at the bottom, perhaps middle groups too. Archaeologically, we look for it in several ways.
Archaeological Evidence for Stratification
Burials are a good indicator. Is someone buried with valuable goods while others have nothing? If a child who hasn’t accomplished anything in a short life is buried with jewels, that child was probably part of an elite group — status inherited rather than earned. Craft specialization is another sign: with agriculture, some people specialize in growing food while others make pots or work as carpenters or stonemasons. We can find the specialized work areas and ask whether house sizes correlate with particular crafts.
The Eternal Question: How Did This Happen?
Many students ask how we got stratified in the first place. It’s an excellent question and an enduring one in anthropology. This is exactly where the deep assumptions creep back in: when we can’t fully explain why stratification emerged, there’s a temptation to assume it “just must naturally happen,” that hierarchy is inevitable or built into human nature. What we can say is that there are different types of stratification, emerging through different processes in different contexts. One grand claim doesn’t work across all cases.
Stratification and Agriculture — But Not Always
Stratification has usually been associated with agriculture, on the logic that only farmers store enough wealth to concentrate it. But closer investigation complicates this. Some hunting-and-gathering groups had large inequalities — the Pacific Northwest again, with slaveholders and enslaved people in a non-agricultural society. And some early agricultural societies, even some of the earliest cities, were relatively egalitarian, with people moving up and down the wealth structure rather than locked into hereditary positions, and with mechanisms for rotating communal duties. Different cases, different factors, different degrees of stratification.
The Role of Large Draft Animals
There is one intriguing pattern. The societies with the biggest wealth disparities tend to be those with large draft animals — horses, cattle, oxen: animals that pull plows and, in the case of horses, can be ridden into battle. These were available for domestication primarily across Eurasia and the Middle East. Societies with access to them seem to show more dramatic inequalities than agricultural societies in the Americas, where domesticated animals were limited to turkeys or, in South America, llamas — poor plow animals in mountainous terrain. The textbook offers this as an intriguing correlation, and the lecture treats it as suggestive rather than proven. It does raise a further question: what happens when societies long accustomed to large draft animals — and to using them in warfare — encounter peoples without that experience? Europeans conquering the Americas carried advantages from these animals, including accumulated resistance to diseases like smallpox that came from living closely with them.
Do Human Societies Tend Toward Complexity?
The textbook asserts that human societies tend toward complexity (237–239). Do they? It depends on how you measure complexity. Here’s one angle: living in a complex society can actually make an individual life simpler. In a hunting-and-gathering society you master every task — tracking animals, identifying plants, making tools, building shelter — skilled, knowledge-heavy work. In an industrial society you might hammer the same thing all day until a robot replaces you. Your individual life has, in some ways, been simplified even as the overall system grew more complex.
Simple Tools, Complex Skills
Here’s another: the simpler your tools, the more complex your bodily skills must be; the smarter your tools, the less skill you need. Consider a lasso — a rope with a loop, one of the simplest tools imaginable. Handed a lasso and told to rope a running animal, most people need years of practice. Handed the newest iPhone — a tool that rates a ten out of ten for complexity — a two-year-old figures it out in seconds. Our tools have become so “smart” that we’ve become button-pushers rather than developing sophisticated bodily skills. Tim Ingold makes this argument in full through techno-units and the evolution of technology.
The Textbook’s Conclusion
The authors conclude — perhaps frustratingly — that “there is no singular reason why human societies trend toward complexity.” There isn’t one explanation and there isn’t one path all societies follow. Societies are differently complicated in different ways; some aspects get more complex while others simplify. The directionality is far less clear than our assumptions suggest.
How Complex Societies Maintain Order: Laws, Norms, and Informal Justice (240, 243)
Every complex society has to coordinate action and maintain order, and the textbook lays out several ways it does so. The most visible is formal rules written down — laws — the things you’re required to do. But in any complex society, laws don’t comprehend all behavior. Alongside them run informal social norms: shared expectations about how people should behave. We’ve learned in recent years that many expectations about how an elected leader like a president should behave were never written into law at all; they were norms — and norms can be broken (240).
The same split runs through justice. Formal justice systems punish those who break the law, up to putting them in jail so they can’t break it again. But there are also informal justice systems — the ways we regulate each other without laws or written regulations. When someone breaks a norm, a community can shame them, sanction them, or exclude them from the group. Gossip works this way: nobody wants to be its subject, and the prospect keeps people in line (243). All of this organizes social life outside a strict state government — and it sets up the next chapter, where economic life and the way we move goods around are likewise often organized outside hierarchical structures.
This governing material is where the anthropology of complexity meets the anthropology of power. For how elites turn an order of inequality into taken-for-granted “common sense” — the manufacture of consent — see the standalone discussion of Gramsci and hegemony, and the broader Power Analysis hub.
Questions This Lecture Answers
Did Teotihuacan have a king? Archaeologists have found no clear evidence of one — no lavish royal tombs and no single dynastic ruler of the kind documented in Maya cities. Some scholars argue for collective or less-visible rulership, but the pyramids and the city’s large, relatively equal housing complex appear to have been built through complex organization rather than the command of a single despot. The absence is what makes the site a challenge to the assumption that monuments require kings.
Does social complexity require hierarchy and inequality? Not automatically. Some hunter-gatherer societies (such as those of the Pacific Northwest) had marked inequality and even slavery, while some early agricultural societies and early cities stayed relatively egalitarian, rotating communal duties and letting people move up and down the wealth structure. Scale and complexity, on the archaeological evidence, do not by themselves produce hierarchy.
Why do some societies develop far more inequality than others? There’s no single cause, but one intriguing correlation stands out: the largest wealth disparities tend to appear in societies with large draft animals — cattle and horses domesticated across Eurasia. The textbook offers this as suggestive rather than settled, and it points away from explanations based on the intelligence or effort of particular peoples.
How do societies keep order without a state? Through informal norms and informal justice. Beyond written laws and formal courts, communities regulate behavior with shaming, sanction, exclusion, and gossip — expectations that are enforced socially rather than legally. Much of daily life runs on these norms, not on the police.
Do human societies inevitably get more complex? The textbook’s own conclusion is that “there is no singular reason why human societies trend toward complexity.” Complexity comes and goes; some aspects of a society elaborate while others simplify, and a more complex social system can even make an individual life simpler.
Continue Exploring
- Previous class: the agricultural transition — why early farming was not the straightforward upgrade we assume.
- Next class: Introduction to Economic Anthropology — how societies move goods around, often outside hierarchical structures.
- The Dawn of Everything course — Graeber and Wengrow on cities, states, and the question of whether hierarchy is inevitable.
- Seasonality and social flexibility — the critique of the bands→tribes→chiefdoms→states sequence.
- Warfare and agriculture — archaeological evidence against the Hobbesian assumption.
- Gramsci and hegemony — how consent to inequality gets manufactured (standalone discussion).
- Power Analysis hub — structures of power, order, and resistance.