As I read this lengthy edited volume, I felt as if I was eating comfort food—a warm beef stew on a wintry day. It has rich chunks of theory, some succulent case studies, all floating in a thick gravy of structuralism. It pulled me back to the “good ole days” (for me, anyway) when structural materialism was pretty much a shared theoretical focus in archaeology. And that is a good thing. Classic structuralism offered a coherent and comprehensive explanation of the processes of human history, and although it is essential to expand into new bodies of theory and to critique extant ones, it is also useful to reexamine bodies of theory that have proven useful in the past. This volume does that nicely.

This is not to say that the volume is stuck in the past, because it definitely is not. It is focused on two newer and quite useful concepts in structuralism. The first is that centralized polities (“states,” in neoevolutionary terms) can be organized either heterarchically, with diffuse authority roles and statuses, or hierarchically (homoarchically), with authority roles and statuses concentrated in only a few hands. The volume's second focal concept is that societies are best conceived of as networks of interacting, sometimes interdependent agents and agencies, referred to in the volume as “social institutions.” These concepts are explained in two introductory chapters by Dmitri Bondarenko and one by Stephen Kowalewski and Jennifer Birch (which is a tour-de-force that should be read by every student of archaeology), and these ideas are reprised nicely in David Small's concluding chapter. The volume as a whole is also framed within a general critique of neoevolutionism, although this critique is not incorporated consistently (indeed, introductory chapters by Henri Claessen and by Nikolay Kradin present something of a neoevolutionary perspective themselves).

Unfortunately, only about half of the volume's 28 chapters adhere closely to the book's conceptual core. Although it is normal for edited volumes to lack thorough integration, it seems odd that one introduced with such a clear conceptual framework would be as loosely integrated as this volume is. Indeed, only 17 chapters specifically address social institutions or heterarchy, but that is not to say that the less integrated contributions are uninteresting or unimportant. The bulk of the volume consists of 22 case studies of cultural evolution, roughly equally divided into sections on the Old World and the New World. Space allows me to discuss only a handful of these overall excellent chapters, and I will focus on three that illustrate some of the diversity of approaches to the cultural evolution of social institutions presented.

An example of one of the volume's more focused case studies is Alexander Nemirovsky's examination of the Ashur polity's transformation from city-state to empire during the Middle Assyrian period (mid-fourteenth to early thirteenth centuries BC). He advocates considering this transformation in terms of broad changes in the structure of political institutions from heterarchy to hierarchy rather than in terms of military success or the maneuverings of shrewd leaders (such as Aššur-uballit, ruler of Ashur from 1353 to 1318 BC), as is common in the extant literature. Several chapters are regional overviews, and David Dye's chapter about the US Southeast is a good example. Dye traces the evolution of regional polities from the Archaic through the early contact periods, framing the discussion in terms of interdependent changes in networks of corporate descent groups, ritual sodalities, and social houses. There are also several chapters focused on historical cases, and one of the most interesting is Ken Baskin's examination of the evolution of Western modernity, in which he argues that Baconian science can be usefully conceived of as a heterarchical social institution that replaced hierarchical religious institutions of knowledge production and control.

The Evolution of Social Institutions is a constructive volume that harkens back to a time when archaeology was (a little) more unified in both theory and focus, and I find that refreshing. The diversity of approaches represented in the volume is also refreshing, but I wish the authors had adhered more uniformly to the conceptual framework put forward in the introductory chapters because I think a fuller examination of heterarchy, neoevolutionism, and structuralism would have been productive—and would be so in the future. On the other hand, the case studies are interesting and compelling on their own, and some are truly excellent contributions to the field. Scholars interested in cultural evolution and classic structuralism will find the volume enjoyable reading, and scholars of all theoretical bents will find the regional chapters worthwhile.