Civilization is often considered to be the culture of state societies, in which urbanism, specialized market exchanges, foreign trade, and traders developed to support large-scale political societies with social stratification, wealth inequalities, and high arts (Childe 1952). The present volume, Trade before Civilizations, as well as the Gothenburg University conference on which it is based, consider the social and political dynamics associated with distant trading as it existed before states, and we have been asked to be discussants and now commentators. Our common research agenda has focused on how political economies underlay the formation of centralized power and social inequality. for both of our lifetimes, we have studied the evolution of intermediate-scaled societies that emerged both before state formation and beyond the domination of states. These societies represent varying political scales and centrality that we have glossed as “trans-egalitarian” and “chiefly” (Earle 1987, 1997; Hayden 1995, 2001a, 2014). In prehistory and history, such societies existed around the world without states and on the periphery of states. The elaboration and significance of trade (long-distance exchange) in these societies involved trans-regional movements of prestige goods (wealth) and people. Such objects carried meaning that structured social relationships in terms of status, roles, values, and authority. To understand wealth-based trade helps us to understand the nature of how social complexity emerged and operated.

Michael Mann and Immanuel Wallerstein, our two greatest macrohistorical scholars, delivered on their long-standing promise to explain the origins of our times. We do have now a much clearer and broader vision of the past, if one cares to notice. The world in the meantime looks as complex and contradictory as ever. Many people despair that it would ever get better. Will it? Our tribute to the life achievement of Michael Mann goes in two steps. We heavily draw on his theories, and we must also draw on his own irreverence for we are going to disagree with Mann's rejection of social evolution. It is far from scholastic disputation. The evolutionary logic is not merely an academic construct but rather a matter of ideological and political power to change other sources of power in the coming decades.

Knowledge on power

After 1945, the world reconstruction boosted mightily the modern intellectual ambition to explain scientifically the patterns of human societies from the beginnings of history and into the future. The departure point was perhaps in the new grave awareness of the threats to life on earth, from the fascist exterminationism in the recent past to the looming future possibilities of nuclear war and global environmental disasters. The fears, however, were outweighed by tremendous optimism and the “can do” spirit of the age. The universal expectation of renewed progress was supported by victory over fascism, the postwar economic growth and welfare expansion, the end of terror and the beginnings of democratization in the communist Eastern Europe, and the independence of former colonies and their resolve to “develop.” Not in the least, worldwide expansion of university education and rapid accumulation of research led to a renewed hope in the abilities of modern science. The key collective actors of the post-1945 transformations were national states and the popular movements aspiring to become national states. Hence the centrality of states, state-directed development, movements, revolutions, and their ideologies for the research agenda of what became called (arguably too narrowly) historical sociology.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, historical sociology experienced its “Golden Age” prepared by the accumulation of social science research across many countries and academic disciplines. The theoretical formulations reconsidering the canonical topics of social science arrived in rapid succession. This “unthinking” of the nineteenth-century paradigms cleared a lot of underbrush.

As archaeologists, we seek to understand variation and change in past human societies. This goal necessitates a comparative approach, and comparisons justify the broad cross-cultural and diachronic scope of our work. Without comparisons we sink into the culture-bound theorizing against which anthropology and archaeology have long sought to broaden social science research. By undertaking comparisons that incorporate long-term social variability, archaeologists not only improve our understanding of the past, but also open the door to meaningful transdisciplinary research. Archaeologists have unique and comprehensive data sets whose analysis can contribute to dialogues surrounding contemporary issues and the myriad challenges of our era.

In the past two decades, the pendulum seems to have swung away from comparative research in archaeology. Many archaeologists focus on detailed contextual descriptions of individual cases, and only a few have dedicated themselves to explicit comparative work. Yet in that same time span, fieldwork has expanded tremendously throughout the world, leading to an explosion of well-documented diachronic data on sites and regions. We now have substantial detail on the variation inherent in phenomena such as cultural assemblages, settlement patterns, and economic activity. New methods, from dating techniques to digital data processing, promote comparative analysis and greatly advance our understanding of human societies and change. The time is ripe for a renewed commitment to comparative research in archaeology.

How were household economies organized in prehistory? In most stateless societies, households dominate much of everyday life, including making a living, sociability, and ritual. A family produced much of what it consumed and exchanged reciprocally with neighboring households. Some specialization and exchange existed certainly, but they were apparently concentrated on special tools and social valuables. With the emergence of political and market economies, households adjusted, but the scope, tempo, and reasons for these adjustments are not well understood.

Premodern economies were composed of four intertwined sectors, involving household subsistence, social relationships among neighbors, political mobilizing for finance, and mercantile trading. We focus here on the household as the nexus of these economic sectors, creating a field of necessities and opportunities that varied temporally and cross-culturally. All human societies have intimate household-size units, which typically are primary constituents in decision making, production and consumption, and childrearing (Johnson and Earle 2000). Because households vary greatly in composition and activities (D’Altroy and Hastorf 2001; Netting et al. 1984), they are good social units for cross-cultural comparison. Households are typically tethered to a house or a residential compound, which allows archaeologists to study the material remains of their activities and social conditions (Allison 1999; D’Altroy and Hastorf 2001; Hendon 1996; Wilk and Rathje 1982).