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Kent Flannery & Joyce Marcus. The creation of inequality: how our prehistoric
ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire. xiv+631 pages, 72
illustrations. 2012. Camb...

Article  in  Antiquity · June 2015

DOI: 10.1017/S0003598X00049176

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 Book reviews
KENT FLANNERY & JOYCE MARCUS. The creation of
inequality: how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage
for monarchy, slavery, and empire. xiv+631 pages,
72 illustrations. 2012. Cambridge (MA): Harvard
University Press; 978-0-674-06469-0 hardback
$39.95 & £29.95.
The authors of this
book are both distin-
guished professors,
Flannery of anthro-
pological archaeol-
ogy, and Marcus of
social evolution, at
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Over a
number of years, they have worked together as leaders
of a programme of field research in Mexico that
has aimed to chart the story of human settlement
from the earliest hunter-gatherers at the end of
the Pleistocene to the time when the Mayan cities
were overrun by Spanish conquest. Joyce Marcus
has also worked on the formative state in Peru;
Kent Flannery started out working with Robert
Braidwood in his quest for the origins of agriculture,
and went on to co-direct a programme of field
research in south-west Iran with Frank Hole, out of
which experience he formulated his influential ‘broad
spectrum revolution’ theory. Together they share an
interest in seeking to understand the process of
social evolution; Flannery’s early prehistoric interests
complement Marcus’ expertise in state formation.
For this book, the authors have ranged far beyond
those geographical regions where their own fieldwork
makes them expert, referring to aspects of societies
ancient and ethnographically recent across the world.
They also range bravely over a great span of
time, from the later Palaeolithic to early states
and empires. Their purpose is to trace how
prehistoric egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups became
‘achievement-based’ societies, within which a man—
the word is chosen accurately—might earn prestige
and influence; and how achievement and prestige
might become institutionalised into power and wealth
in the hands of hereditary elites. They say they want
to show that these developments were not simply
the result of population increase, or the ability to
accumulate a food or other surplus. Rather, their case
is that there is an inevitable social logic that lies at the
core of every human group.

C Antiquity Publications Ltd.
ANTIQUITY 87 (2013): 600–625
600
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Intriguingly, the Preface opens with Rousseau’s ‘A
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men’,
which failed to win an essay competition organised by
the Academy of Dijon in 1753, but which nevertheless
has influenced thinking on social affairs and social
evolution more than most of us can recognise.
Rousseau’s ideas on the origins of inequality reappear
throughout the book, as the authors seek to shift the
reader gently away from some deeply embedded ideas
that we may have, for example, about fundamental
differences between hunter-gatherers and the societies
of farmers. Perhaps many archaeologists today do
not need to be shown that some of these ideas are
outdated; but the authors did not write the book for
their professional anthropological and archaeological
colleagues. It was written for the curious (and hardy)
general reader. At more than 600 pages of densely
packed information, ideas and discussion it is not
lightweight, although it is always highly readable,
and laced with the barbs of wit and imaginative
humour that have characterised Flannery’s work since
the 1960s.
Writing for a non-professional readership (and there
will be few professional academics with a knowledge
wide and deep enough to read this whole book
critically), the authors have avoided academic jargon.
They have also made the text flow smooth and fast by
not having any in-text references. Instead, where one
would expect to find the bibliography, there are more
than 40 pages of bibliographical notes.
The text moves from descriptions of key features
at one archaeological site after another, and from
ethnographic accounts of a colourful range of
examples, first on this continent, then on that. So
it is easy—as with a TV documentary—to be drawn
along at the authors’ pace, and not take time to think
about the questions in one’s own mind. There is no
discussion, for example, of two important starting
points: what do the authors mean by ‘egalitarian’
societies and ‘inequality’? By default, it becomes clear
that they are interested in the inequality of personal
prestige that can be converted into authority, because
their end point is the development of political power
and authority. Because they set themselves a start-date
of around 15 000 BC, which is just in time for the
colonisation of the Americas by egalitarian hunter-
gatherer groups, they do not give consideration to
the hundreds of thousands, and millions, of years of
egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups in the Old World.
http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/087/ant0870600.htm
 Review
And, while they insist that the emergence of inequality
is not to be explained by population levels or the
ability to accumulate surplus, they do not review and
refute the theories of others.
The authors want us to be clear that the evolutionary
process was neither unilinear nor inevitable. They
show with their examples that, for all the farmers and
horticulturalists who classify in terms of lineages, clans
or moieties, there are others who keep things simple,
recognising only close kin relationships. And vice
versa with hunter-gatherer societies, some of which
were or are socially extraordinarily complex. Further,
there is nothing inevitable about the transition
from achievement-based societies and prestigious
individuals to societies in which status and power
is inherited; they show us societies where—at least
within a certain time-frame—prestige for some and
egalitarianism for all are held in balance. The authors
want us to think about the ‘social logic’ that has
tripped development in a particular direction in some
situations, but not in others. And the occasional and,
sometimes, barbed allusions to our contemporary
world show us that they also want us to reflect on
what all this analysis of the past can teach us in today’s
world.
In the part of the book where the subject matter is
the area of my own knowledge—the final Pleistocene
and early Holocene in south-west Asia—I am uneasy
with the authors’ treatment. Perhaps if I knew more
about Central and North American archaeology, I
might feel uncomfortable with their handling of the
archaeology of that region, too. Of course, I can say
that the authors should have included reference to
another site, rather than the site that they chose
to describe; and I can quibble about details (and
regret their use of dates that seem to be based on
uncalibrated radiocarbon chronology BP, which puts
their account at odds with the standard literature).
But that is nit-picking. I am, however, uneasy about
their labelling of certain buildings within a number of
sites of the late Epipalaeolithic (Natufian) and early
Neolithic as ‘men’s houses’. How did they come to
such an understanding? Certainly not from any of
the archaeologists who have excavated these buildings,
such as the so-called ‘Skull Building’ at Çayönü
Tepesı, or what Klaus Schmidt has daringly suggested
may be temples at Göbekli Tepe—both in south-east
Turkey—or Danielle Stordeur has termed communal
buildings at Jerf el Ahmar on the Euphrates in
northern Syria.
601
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Where do the ‘men’s houses’ come from, then?
Disarmingly, in the Preface, the authors assure the
reader that the book will not be loaded with
theoretical stuff—“there is probably no bigger ‘buzz
kill’ than a long, ponderous chapter on competing
hypotheses”. The theory and method on which
the book’s thesis is based is very simple: among
ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers, they
differentiate those societies that are egalitarian, and
lacking social institutions beyond close kin relations,
and those that recognise clans. Clans involve people
thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and therefore,
sometimes, of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, which can result
in acts of violence. Their chosen examples of such
societies are seen to have cosmological myths and
ritual practices—and men’s houses (are there really
no women’s houses?).
Just as zoology and palaeontology interlock—the one
supplying the kind of information that is deficient in
the other—so, the authors tell us, anthropology and
prehistoric archaeology can work together. Therefore,
in prehistoric situations where there is evidence for
violence amounting to acts of ambush or violent
death, or protective walls around the settlement, and
where there are also buildings that are large, central,
non-domestic, or full of symbolic representations,
those buildings can be said to be ‘men’s houses’.
Methodologically, we are a long way from the
scientific processualism of Flannery’s youth.
Caveat lector. That said, the book is a pleasure to read,
simply and attractively written, full of illuminating
material collected from a huge variety of sources. For
the general reader for whom it is intended, it will
be both informative and enjoyable. Its final chapter
seeks to relate the emergence of inequality to our
present world, where inequality is a matter of great
concern to many. Its ideas are provocative, to be
sure. Their account should make archaeologists think
about matters such as achievement-based societies in
which prestige and reputation are important, and
their ‘social logic’. The authors recognise that their
account is sometimes sketchy, and the archaeological
evidence may be over-interpreted, and they challenge
us to do better with the new and important questions
Review
that it raises.
TREVOR WATKINS
School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh, UK
(Email: T.Watkins@ed.ac.uk)

C Antiquity Publications Ltd.