Christian E. Peterson

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa | UH Manoa · Department of Anthropology

Archaeological research has by now revealed a great deal of variation in the way early complex societies, or chiefdoms, developed. This variation is widely recognized, but our understanding of the forces that produced it remains relatively undeveloped. This paper takes aim at such understanding by exploring variation in the local economies of six e...

A synthetic history of human land use Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....

Much of the literature on the role played by environment in complex society development focuses on temporal correspondence between climate change and human social change. Many such studies fall into a series of traps: the unwarranted assumption that correlation equals causation; failure to evaluate the statistical significance of the association; s...

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24646. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25992.pdf.

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a lo...

Analysis of a large sample of household artifact assemblages from residential zones dating to the Hongshan period (4500–3000 BCE) in northeastern China complements regional-scale settlement study and excavation of house structures, platforms, and tombs. Prestige differentiation between household units is recognizable but modest. Productive differen...

The complex of Niuheliang, in north-eastern China, with its concentration of ceremonial architecture and unusual art, has been considered the most highly developed polity of the Hongshan period, representing the integration of a large territory. In contrast, the supposed absence of residential remains has been advanced to suggest that it was a vaca...

Detailed dataset to accompany Drennan, Peterson, Lu, and Li 2017. Available online at .

Household refuse is ideally suited for the comparative study of social and economic inequality. Compositional variation revealed by nonmetric multidimensional scaling of artifact assemblage data from multiple households is readily interpreted as evidence for qualitative differences in social prestige, wealth, and productive activities. Different co...

Open access dataset available in the Comparative Archaeology Database, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh: www.cadb.pitt.edu.

The Neolithic and Bronze Age remains of northeastern China have traditionally been organized into a sequence of spatially extensive archaeological cultures. Scholars typically describe a particular homogeneous "lifeway" thought to characterize each culture. Because this approach provides little room for discussion of internal social dynamics, most...

A reconstruction of regional settlement and demographic patterns. Book can be downloaded at <http://www.pitt.edu/~ccapubs/books/ca004.html>.

Open access dataset available in the Comparative Archaeology Database, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh: www.cadb.pitt.edu.

A longstanding theme in Chinese archaeology is the emergence of “Chinese civilization”. Hongshan societies represent the first clear steps toward complex social, political, and economic organization in this part of the world. And yet, it is Hongshan symbolism and ideology that has most captivated archaeologists, with many pinpointing Hongshan socie...

The Early Yangshao period (5000–4000 BC) village of Jiangzhai is the most completely excavated and reported of any early agricultural community in the middle reaches of northern China’s Yellow River Valley. This comprehensive dataset can better our understanding of early agricultural village societies and complex society development, especially the...

Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse topics and regions covered in the book contribute to the growing understanding of variation and...

Part of a resurgence in the comparative study of ancient societies, this book presents a variety of methods and approaches to comparative analysis through the examination of wide-ranging case studies. Each chapter is a comparative study, and the diverse topics and regions covered in the book contribute to the growing understanding of variation and...

As archaeologists, we seek to understand variation and change in past human societies. This goal necessitates a comparative approach, and comparisons justify the broad cross-cultural and diachronic scope of our work. Without comparisons we sink into the culture-bound theorizing against which anthropology and archaeology have long sought to broaden...

The chiefdom has been taken by many scholars to be a highly specific and unvarying societal type, but the emergence of the large human communities that have often been labeled chiefdoms took a number of different paths in different regions. Comparative analysis of the kinds of archaeological evidence most directly relevant to the social organizatio...

Reconstruction of settlement and demographic patterns. Book is available for download at: <http://www.pitt.edu/~ccapubs/books/ca002.html>

Open access dataset available in the Comparative Archaeology Database, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh: .

Much recent archaeological literature has stressed the variety of forms that early non-egalitarian societies may take. This variety has been characterized as “horizontal” variation (Drennan 1996, Feinman 2000) in contrast to the “vertical” dimension of social ranking most emphasized in the traditional cultural evolutionary literature. Much of cultu...

The Hongshan societies of northeastern China are among East Asia's earliest complex societies. They have been known largely from elaborate burials with carved jades in ceremonial platforms. The most monumental remains are concentrated in a "core zone" in western Liaoning province. Residential remains are less well known and most investigations of t...

The emergence of centralized supra-local communities followed a number of different pathways, and varied considerably in its pacing in different regions. The establishment of settled agricultural life often set the stage for the emergence of these larger scale and more complex societies by creating the larger, denser populations without which they...

Comparative study of early complex societies (chiefdoms) conjures visions of a cultural evolutionary emphasis on similarities and societal typology. Variation within the group has not been as systematically examined but offers an even more productive avenue of approach to fundamental principles of organization and change. Three widely separated tra...

The study of developing complex societies can fruitfully focus on the human interactions that define communities, which have always been at the heart of settlement pattern research. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities of varying scales can actually be identified in archaeological survey data. Most often sites have simply been assu...

N o early chiefdom society was exactly like that of another region, but all represented the initial development of permanent hierarchical social relations in their respective regions. In these societies, those who would be chiefs were successful enough at forging unequal social relationships with other members of their own communities that the fund...

Rank-size analysis of settlement systems in archaeology has focused strongly on departures from log-normality, but it is not clear that a log-normal pattern should ordinarily be expected. Direct comparison of observed rank-size curves to each other is of greater utility in identifying chronological change and inter-regional variation in settlement...