Evolutionarily oriented researchers have long appreciated variability in trajectories of change through time, allowing for the possibilities of divergence, convergence, hybridization, and the impacts of other factors on any given evolutionary sequence. Yet in archaeology, the influential neo-evolutionary perspectives on societal complexity of the mid-twentieth century channeled thinking into strongly unilineal, stage-based frameworks. These frameworks engendered new lines of investigation and moved archaeology past the terminological baggage of earlier approaches to the “origins of (mostly Western) civilization”; but almost as soon as they were proposed, scholars found them deficient in ignoring certain key elements of social life or not matching particular archaeological datasets.

This recent volume, edited by Lane Fargher and Verenice Heredia Espinoza, is truthful in its advertising, as the title and subtitle convey the unifying theme and varied angles for approaching it. Alternative Pathways to Complexity has its own evolutionary trajectory, with origins in a Festschrift to the distinguished career of Richard Blanton. Blanton's decades of field and comparative research has sparked the critical rethinking of highly centralized frameworks for the emergence of social complexity—focused largely on political leaders and conflict—in favor of more diffuse and participatory social entanglements such as domestic economies, markets, and world systems. True to his legacy, the volume represents an important contribution to the examination of issues for which Blanton has furthered scholarship, organized as three sections with cases from Mesoamerica, the Old World, and cross-cultural studies.

The volume as a whole will be of interest to scholars concerned with comparative analyses of early large-scale societies, particularly their political and economic organization. Contributions reflect, and reflect on, Blanton's academic career, which provides coherence to the diversity of subjects. Slightly over half of the contributors are primarily Mesoamerican specialists, but many of these have, like Blanton, contributed to the archaeology of other culture areas. Many of the contributors grapple with understanding variability in sociopolitical organization along the corporate-network axis that Blanton and colleagues first outlined in the mid-1990s, or its evolution into the more comparatively grounded field of collective action research, which articulates with interdisciplinary social sciences and has been pursued by Blanton, Fargher, and others.

Blanton's intellectual legacy nicely frames the chapters through an introduction by Fargher, Heredia, and Cynthia Bedell, and two final chapters by Tim Earle and Fargher. Case studies from particular parts of the globe are written to touch more broadly on themes of general archaeological concern, and will be of interest to researchers working elsewhere. Mesoamerican chapters focus on economic organization (Stephen Kowalewski, Frances Berdan, Lisa LeCount), architecture (Arthur Joyce and Sarah Barber, Christopher Beekman, Barbara Stark), and survey data (Kowalewski, Heredia, Stark). Among the Old World cases, Peter Robertshaw covers historic period Uganda, and Deborah Winslow provides an ethnoarchaeological study of architecture in contemporary Sri Lanka. Robertshaw's study and two archaeological cases from the Old World (T. L. Thurston on Scandinavia and Rita Wright comparing the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia) examine their cases through the lenses of collective-action theory. Among the cross-cultural studies, Peter Peregrine and Carol Ember provide an ethnographic analysis of the relationship between environmental calamity, warfare, and networking political strategies; Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas focus primarily at issues of societal scale, political financing, and social capital/collective action; and Earle problematizes the distinction between polities deemed primary or secondary by instead emphasizing political-economic strategies.

Together, the contributions underscore the maturation of research on variability in past complex societies as well as the need for multiscalar frameworks. Within anthropological archaeology we strive to maintain cultural relativism and neutrality within our analytical frames, yet there remains the impulse to overlay value judgements on whether particular societies of the past we study are deemed to have been collective, inclusive, or resilient, versus elite-individualizing, exclusive, or ultimately inflexible. An important issue that comes through in the assembly of diverse cases such as this is to draw attention to scales of analyses and specifically examine interactions at varying scales. Some societies may have been ruled by preening kings who invested little in public works, but at the intermediate scales of suprahousehold resource management or market activities there was a tremendous level cooperation and coordination; others may have been internally very collective in holding principals accountable for returning public goods, but with one outcome being the sort of corporate military power that allowed them to conquer or terrorize their neighbors. The movement away from mere social typology to such issues of scale and interaction is one of the major contributions of Blanton's career and its continued evolution in this volume.