Amazon.com description: Product Description: This book is part of a series resulting from the World Archaeological Congress held in 1986 which addressed world archaeology in its widest sense. It emphasised that archaeology is much more than the mere recording of specific cultural events. It embraces the study of social and cultural change in its entirety. The authors set out to examine the nature of social hierarchies and political centralization in a specifically chosen set. Their material embraces what would traditionally be called "ranked" societies - chiefdoms, ancient "civilizations", European colonial states and a modern national state from the Third World. In all these cases it is clear that without the sophisticated understanding and use of terminolology and concepts deriving primarily from sociology and social anthropology, archaeologists must inevitably be guilty of the most gross oversimplifications in their treatment of other (past) societies. The findings demonstrate the inter-disciplinary nature of archaeological, sociological and anthropological investigation and interpretation epitomizing the indivisible nature of past and present.