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Review of: The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the
Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire, by Kent Flannery & Joyce Marcus

Article  in  Cambridge Archaeological Journal · January 2013

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The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set
the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire,
by Kent Flannery & Joyce Marcus, 2012. Cambridge (MA):
Harvard University Press; ISBN 978-0-674-06469-0
hardback £29.95 & US$39.95; xiii + 631 pp., 72 figs.
Randall McGuire
In The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors
Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire two of the
world’s most distinguished anthropological archaeologists,
Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus take on one of the most
fundamental archaeological questions of the twentieth
century. They ask: how did human societies evolve from a
universal stage of egalitarian foragers to a modern world
where virtually everyone lives under the sway of affluent
leaders, dictators, kings and presidents? They explicitly
take up the conversation on egalitarianism as the natural
state of humans that Jean-Jacques Rousseau initiated with
his 1753 work A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among
Men. They most directly follow in the footsteps of the major
twentieth-century anthropological scholars of unilinear cul-
tural evolution including Leslie White, Morton Fried, Elman
Service and Robert Carneiro. They wrote the book for the
‘general reader who is curious about his or her prehistoric
ancestors’. The authors bring a lifetime of a research and
thought on the origins and evolution of complex society to
this effort. The result is a book of incredible depth and detail
that is also ponderous and severely dated.
Flannery and Marcus dismiss many of the causal fac-
tors that other scholars have raised to account for cultural
evolution. They question genetic explanations for cultural
evolution and those that apply principles of biological
evolution to cultural evolution. They directly critique the
Sociobiology of the 1980s. In attacking Sociobiology, they are
kicking a dead horse and the few references that they make
to modern Evolutionary Psychology seem tacked on to the
Sociobiology critique. They do not engage with more current
and viable theories of group selection and cultural evolution
such as the work of David Sloan Wilson. They also set aside
the materialist causal factors of the 1970s such as population
growth, food stress and environmental circumscription.
They argue that the key to understanding cultural
evolution rests on the unique social logic that lies at the core
of every society. In all of their cases, they reveal this social
logic and present it as a bulleted list of key points. They
assert that the conscious manipulation of this logic creates
change and leads to greater inequality and hierarchy in
cultures. By the same token, they recognize that conscious
human agents also seek to manipulate this logic to maintain
egalitarian relationships. This concept of struggle chips
away at the teleological logic of unilineal evolution because
it means that people can reverse the process of increasing
inequality. It also includes human emotions, desires and
goals as important aspects driving evolutionary change.
Their notion of active human agents using the social logic of
groups to struggle over inequality makes their theory more
dynamic and less deterministic than the classical materialist
theories of unilineal cultural evolution.
1
Like most works of unilinear cultural evolution
Flannery and Marcus find great consistencies in the global
development of societies. They argue that five or six varieties
of human society emerged over and over again in different
parts of the world. They recognize that hundreds of logi-
cal premises could have been used to justify inequality in
societies but they maintain that a handful worked so well
that dozens of unrelated societies independently came up
with them. Despite their more original approach to social
logic, their unilineal varieties of human society sound a lot
like band, tribe, chiefdom, state or egalitarian, ranked and
stratified societies.
The reader may have some difficulty in following the
evolutionary path through these varieties of society because
the authors do not clearly list or identify the varieties until
the final chapter of the book. They begin with egalitarian
humans in a state of nature which they call clanless forager
societies. Like Fried and others before them, they can only
speak of these societies as egalitarian by ignoring inequali-
ties found in relationships of age or gender. Social inequality
appears on the evolutionary scene in clan/descent group
foragers. The following social variety, achievement based
societies, usually appear with the advent of agriculture
but the cultures of the Northwest Coast demonstrate that
they can appear in rich hunting and gathering environ-
ments. Both agricultural societies and rich foragers can
transition into hereditary ranked societies. The evolutionary
progression culminates, as always, in kingdoms (the word
they prefer for states) and empires and like University of
Michigan materialists since the 1970s they archaeologically
recognize these advance societies by the presence of a four
tiered settlement hierarchy. They conclude by asserting that
we can create an egalitarian world by putting foragers in
charge of global society.
The majority of the book consists of Flannery and
Marcus using ethnographic and archaeological examples
to demonstrate the process of cultural evolution. For each
case, they identify the social logic of the group and then
show how human agents can or did manipulate that logic
to either increase inequality or check inequities. They use
the standard cultural evolutionary method of cross-cultural
comparison to select and link societies. They construct a
timeless ethnographic present which uses the first descrip-
tions of cultures that predate colonialization and globaliza-
tion. They pluck their cases from across the globe and from
thousands of years of time and then sort them by their
position in the unilineal order of evolution. The number of
cases that they discuss, the detail that they give each example
and the global scope of the cases is simply astounding. Any
anthropologist can only be in awe of the depth and extent
of their knowledge. However, long before the reader gets
to the last text on page 564 the detail, density and number
of societies has become ponderous.
Flannery and Marcus argue that good theory can come
from any decade and they clearly prefer that which is tried
and true. Contrary to the authors’ viewpoint, however, social
theory does not age like fine wine. Rather, it is more like a
dog’s bone. Initially, the dog enjoys the juicy new bone but
as she chews and gnaws on it she reduces it to a brittle husk
 devoid of sustenance. Social theories inspire scholars to ask
new questions and to gain new understandings about the
world just as a dog enjoys a new bone. However, eventu-
ally they exhaust those insights and new theory frames
new questions that lead us to new knowledge. New social
theories are never original but rather re-ask old questions
in new ways that open up new perspectives. Flannery and
Marcus may wish to recast a theory of unilineal cultural
evolution for the twenty-first century, but to do so they
must address the critiques that have led virtually all cultural
anthropologists and most archaeologists to abandon unilin-
eal evolutionary theory at the end of the twentieth century.
Their simplistic dismissal of this trend as ‘politically correct’
does not adequately speak to the critiques.
The Creation of Inequality suffers from the same flaws
as all universalizing, unilinear theories of cultural evolu-
tion. Anthropologists working in the 1980s such as Eric
Wolf (1982 1983 IN REFS) and Johannes Fabian (1983 1982
IN REFS) clearly identified these flaws. They include the
spatializing of time in the cross-cultural comparison, the idea
that modern ‘primitive’ societies represent frozen moments
of cultural evolution rather than dynamic products of their
own historical contexts, and concept of societies as hard
bounded objects that spin and bounce off each other like so
many billiard balls on the pool table of cultural evolution.
Other scholars such as Bruce Trigger (1998) have tried with
some success, to address these critiques in their theories of
cultural evolution.
Flannery and Marcus define their audience as the
general reader but in the end their attempt at popular writ-
ing flounders. They try to make their prose more accessible
by appealing to outdated popular culture and by adopting
a flippant tone in a myriad of asides. As a fellow boomer, I
found their invocation of popular culture quite intelligible. I
am, however, doubtful that anyone under the age of 40 will
get most of their references. Examples would include their
discussion of the term the ‘big kahuna’ and their mention
of the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Flippancies
such as ‘After briefly consulting his old friend Jack Daniels,
Mac Neish replied “Put hunters and gatherers in charge”’
(p . 558) left me wondering if the authors expect the reader
to take them seriously. Perhaps I have erred by taking them
too seriously in this review?

Randall McGuire
Anthropology
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY, 13902-6000
USA
Email: rmcguire@binghamton.edu

References

Fabian, J., 1982. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes
Its Object. New York (NY): Columbia University Press.
Trigger, B., 1998. Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and
Contingency. Hoboken (NJ): Wiley, John and Sons.
Wolf, E., 1983. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley
(CA): University of California Press.

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