Normally, a book's title refers to the main subject matter, but “The Emergence of Premodern States” is misleading because the chapters address two main topics only peripherally related to state emergence. One consists of cross-cultural comparisons of variation, considering cultural complexity, or roles and statuses, the latter in the chapter by Paula Sabloff and Skyler Cragg. In the chapter by Scott Ortman, Lily Blair, and Peter Peregrine, cultural complexity is measured from tabulations of trait lists, and the same kind of analysis informs Peregrine's on recurrent social formations. Laura Fortunato traces the history of comparative research in archaeology.

The other main topic is an argument that social change is best understood as the outcome of bioevolutionary process. These chapters mimic the approaches of evolutionary psychology and “evolutionary anthropology” and depend on their computational modeling methods. Modeling is found in the chapter by Paul Hooper and coauthors, where they evaluate the role of resource competition in the rise of hierarchical leadership in small-scale societies. Timothy Kohler and coauthors also use modeling to develop what they call a “proof-of-concept” method to understand sociopolitical evolution that, they argue, will allow researchers to move beyond the “verbal models that have dominated past archaeological discourses” but no longer “move the field forward” (p. 172). I wonder how this approach can move the field forward, given that, because they set the variable parameters, modelers can push results in whatever direction they might be aiming for (as described in Kohler et al., pp. 138 and 175). In his chapter, Ortman unquestioningly accepts a claim of evolutionary psychology that “humans are innately prosocial toward close kin” (p. 238; a claim that is not widely accepted), but how, he asks, is cooperation possible beyond close kin? Cooperation theories demonstrate how humans build institutions (“rules of the game”) that foster cooperation, but none of this literature is cited by Ortman (in fact, institution-building is missing in action throughout this volume). Ortman's answer, which he describes as the “fundamental driver of social complexity” (p. 238), is that humans make use of conceptual metaphors such as “brother” to extend the “bodily experience of social closeness” to nonkin (p. 238) (unfortunately, humans are also adept at using conceptual metaphors such as “dog,” “pig,” “animal,” etc. to demean others and to inhibit cooperation).

I was surprised at the degree to which many of the book's authors accept the methods and assumptions of evolutionary psychology with no acknowledgment of critics who place it well outside the domain of scientific epistemology owing to its dependence on modeling rather than hypothesis-testing. Another problem pointed to by critics is that, to carry out agent-based modeling, human psychology is reduced to a few simple instinct-driven impulses (“inherited proclivities” in Kohler et al., p. 137) such as a propensity to defect or not, punish or not, be prosocial or not, be territorial or not, tend to remain solitary or form alliances, or prefer hierarchy or not and so on (e.g., in Hooper et al., pp. 107, 111–115). It is not at all clear to me how an approach that is so far removed from the reality of human mentality and social experience will “move the field forward.” However, it is consistent with a theme present across the chapters in which human agency and institution-building either are absent or are restricted to the actions of an oppressive elite class (e.g., Sabloff and Cragg claim on p. 83 that commoners, farmers, herders, and serfs constitute a passive domain ruled by state government, coerced by the power of an army or police, and in other ways are controlled by superiors).

The notion of an oppressive state is another consistent theme. Antistatist philosophy is expressed, for example, in Henry Wright's brief chapter on early state studies, when he writes (without evidence) that states evolved even though people didn't want them (p. 15), and by Kohler and coauthors, who point to a “natural reluctance of people to give up their political autonomy” (p. 137). Sabloff and Cragg's study of roles and statuses leads them to the claim that in premodern states rulers were so powerful that they controlled trade and regulated the distribution of goods and services, “thereby controlling everyone's opportunity for wealth accumulation” (p. 81). They cite me and my coauthor Lane Fargher for having written that in Lower Mesopotamia and Old Kingdom Egypt a king “theoretically owns all the land and everyone works for him” (p. 95). But we would never have written that, because there is no Old Kingdom documentation regarding the proportion of privately held land, while for Early Dynastic III (not Early Dynasty III as found on p. 60) there is abundant textual evidence of private land sales (and the page of ours they cite is a description of public goods in premodern South Asian states). Why would they jump to such an unsupportable claim? Why are institutions avoided and the state bad-mouthed in many of the book's chapters? I propose an answer: while the book's main themes do not align with current research that addresses how state formation might involve thoughtful institution-building for cooperation, in important ways they do reflect some of the conservative ideas promoted by the book's funding source, the John Templeton Foundation.