The ways in which human interaction was restructured during complexification in fifty-seven natural experiments from around the world, is characterized in twenty-one variables in the domains of interaction, demography, and political economy. Examination of the data in this way reveals an enormous range of variation among early complex societies on all counts.

A comparison of trajectories (i.e., of how things change through time in complexification) is pursued graphically by aligning trajectories in time according to their points of initial regional integration and of maximal differentiation. Some of these patterns of change “rhyme” in time and signal bundles of trajectories in which similar changes can be seen as responses to similar forces.

Rigorous collection, reporting, and analysis of household artifact assemblage data in future research would make it possible to characterize differentiation of all kinds with greater confidence. The lack of regional-scale settlement research in some regions leaves demographic estimates lacking good support. The richness of ethnographic information for some places has undermined the archaeological research needed to say how organization developed before the “ethnographic present.”

Primary archaeological knowledge is produced through intensive regional specialization – the antithesis of broad comparative analysis, which demands critical and consistent expert evaluation of information across multiple areas. The availability and quality of data from different regions are spotty, requiring new and more robust analytical approaches for complete reanalysis of primary data for comparative purposes.

Distinguishing between wealth, prestige, productive, and ritual differentiation proves especially enlightening in ferreting out the dynamics underlying different bundles of trajectories in which social complexity emerges in different ways and takes different forms. Ideas previously posed as contradictory accounts of the universal origin of social complexity are seen to be complementary accounts of different bundles.

The cultural discontinuities following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms include the abandonment of major centers and smaller settlements accompanied by loss of social structures, literacy, quarried stone architecture, and figured representations. Archaeological evidence from four centuries later, in the eighth century BCE, shows that there were also important continuities, e.g., the Greek language, names of divinities, a warrior ethos, and communal feasting. Greek commerce both eastwards and westwards increased, and Greeks began to settle in the West Mediterranean and North Africa. This volume examines the Greek Iron Age, ca. 1200–700 BCE, between the Mycenaean collapse and the beginning of the Archaic period. The relative chronology of this period, based on carefully constructed sequences of pottery styles, provides a stable framework. However, recent radiocarbon dates have suggested that the absolute dating of the pottery styles should be revised upwards.

A brief introduction surveys current thinking on how to subdivide the period into phases of broadly similar durations spanning roughly a century and a half in absolute years. The remainder of the chapter focuses on three distinct topics: ceramic pictorialism in post-palatial Mycenaean art; an update on scholarship dealing with the dark-surfaced, handmade, and burnished ceramic classes that have been recognized as significant novelties in Aegean container assemblages from the end of the thirteenth through the eleventh centuries BCE, along with their spread eastward in some cases to Cyprus and southwestern Syria during the twelfth century; and the noteworthy spatial expansion of production centers of Mycenaeanizing decorated fine wares during the twelfth century to multiple locations on Cyprus, in Macedonia, and at various sites along the Levantine mainland from Cilicia in the north to Philistia in the south.

The Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex, or SACC, a collection of city-states that surrounded the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea during the early first millennium BCE, is traditionally understudied by researchers interested in contacts between the Aegean and the Near East. In part this is due to the interest garnered by the Phoenicians and their far-flung colonies, but it is also because the complicated ethnolinguistic composition of the city-states themselves defies easy categorization. This chapter presents an overview of the material evidence for the robust exchange between the Aegean and SACC during the early first millennium BCE. Syro-Anatolian finds in the Aegean, especially luxury items including worked ivory and bronze objects, couple with Aegean ceramics in the Levant and southeastern Anatolia to index a surprisingly robust exchange between the two spheres. Although the mechanisms of this exchange remain unclear, it is now apparent that SACC was a major component of Iron Age eastern Mediterranean cultural and economic networks.