Social Evolution Today

Abstract

While Gordon Childe’s synthetic descriptive works of Near Eastern and European prehistory have long been overtaken, his social evolutionism remains of interest. His concept of social evolution was not dogmatically unilinear. It involved branching differentiation and diffusion and an acknowledged role for what he called ‘the Darwinian formula of “variation, heredity, adaptation and selection”’ in the understanding of cultural change. Moreover, unlike many later archaeological neo-evolutionists, he regarded the social evolutionary schemes of comparative anthropology as broad guiding frameworks whose implications were to be tested by archaeology, rather than as providing a series of stages into which the archaeological material was to be slotted. Those approaches have mostly lost their credibility in archaeology in the last 20 years, leaving much of the discipline without a very clear agenda, despite the continuing importance of the issues that the evolutionists were trying to address. This paper argues that developments in evolutionary anthropology and institutional economics over the last 25 years provide a basis for an updated and theoretically powerful approach to characterising social evolution and explaining the patterns identified in terms of well-founded micro-scale processes which would not be out of keeping with Childe’s own perspective.