In Killing Civilization, Justin Jennings attacks that most refractory vestige of nineteenth-century evolutionary models. Others have assaulted “civilization” for its usage in promoting a vision of Western superiority and justifying colonialism, but many of us continue to employ the term, ostensibly divorced from notions of cultural progress or superiority, as a useful category for comparing extensive, populous networks of societies with pronounced sociopolitical hierarchies. For Jennings, though, civilization is a golem, a creature formed for service to its human creator, which outlives its usefulness and lumbers on, leaving in its wake great damage to our understanding of societal processes that link the emergence of cities, states, colonies, and cultural horizons.

Jennings argues that the civilization concept is problematic for (1) the negative associations of the term as used to justify colonial and racist projects, (2) its imposition of a staircase structure on cultural change, and (3) the unwarranted use of later, better-understood “civilizations” to flesh out earlier, less-understood ones (pp. 265–267). He focuses on the second of these problems, and the third, which flows from it. Essentially, Jennings argues that states developed as a response to scalar stresses induced by settlement aggregation in cities and that urbanization itself was a protracted, messy process of responding to scalar stresses in rapidly growing settlements.

Jennings prosecutes his case in 10 chapters. He begins by situating the modern usage of the term in the unilineal evolutionary stages of Lewis Henry Morgan and other nineteenth-century evolutionists and identifying the contemporary problems with the concept. Chapter 2 traces the historical development of the concept from primordial intergroup “preference” (or bias) and ancient Chinese and Classical Western distinctions between the civilized and the uncivilized through late twentieth-century neoveolutionism and postprocessualism. Chapter 3 describes the founding and growth of four modern cities—Singapore, São Paolo, Los Angeles, and Abu Dhabi—to underscore his argument that cities emerge over time through “an ungainly process of becoming,” to use Robert Katlan's frequently quoted phrase. Jennings then presents six case studies (Çatalhöyuk, Cahokia, Harappa, Jenne-Jeno, Tiahuanaco, and Monte Albán) of settlements that experienced rapid aggregation, which in turn promoted movements toward urbanization with diverse outcomes, falling short of full urbanization in the “aborted city” of Çatalhöyuk. He concludes with a discussion of how civilization has obscured critical trends in the development of early cities, states, and cultural horizons. These trends include (1) an “enduring aversion to hierarchy” (p. 274) in the earliest cities, (2) the later emergence of states as a reaction to the scalar stresses engendered by urbanization, (3) the initial establishment of colonies as a tactic undertaken piecemeal by groups to make ends meet in an urbanizing landscape, and (4) the spread of cultural horizons before the emergence of regionally organized states.

There is much of value in this book. Jennings largely succeeds in the difficult task of striking a balance between recognizing significant differences among cases while extracting meaningful generalizations. In such a wide-ranging volume there is an understandable reliance on synthetic treatments of different regions, which raises the question of how much his presentation reflects the interpretive biases of his sources. In the case I know best, though, he does a good job of acknowledging and, where possible, reconciling, alternative interpretations of the development of Monte Albán and the Zapotec state.

Jennings makes a convincing argument against the lock-step development of the traits ascribed to civilization, even if his claims for the continued damage done by imposing a stair-step model on culture change sometimes seem overdrawn in the face of his repeated acknowledgment that few archaeologists today believe that change was instantaneous or totalizing. He also argues convincingly for the priority of urbanization over state formation in the cases he examines. Consideration of additional cases likely would reveal greater variation than is suggested in his model of cascading processes of urbanization, colonization, expansion of a cultural horizon, and state formation; the nonurban horizon of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere springs to mind. Some readers will find his explanation of cultural horizons overly centrifugal, echoing “mother culture” models for the origins of civilization, despite his insistence that “cultural horizons, like colonies, are the result of widespread interaction networks that tie groups together” (p. 282) and that were not centrally controlled (p. 20). Jennings, furthermore, makes the excellent point that urbanizing centers required the creation of a countryside, but he seems to lump together extractive colonies, diaspora communities, and trading enclaves in arguing that colonies precede state formation.

In sum, Jennings has produced a provocative, highly readable study, which I recommend to all interested in urbanization and state formation and as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. It will surely provoke discussion and debate, and will provide a valuable springboard for future research. Civilization is a resilient beast, though. Jennings has struck it a severe blow, but I doubt he has succeeded in killing civilization in the academy, much less in the public imagination.