Abstract
The emergence of centralized supra-local communities followed a number of different pathways, and varied considerably in its pacing in different regions. The establishment of settled agricultural life often set the stage for the emergence of these larger scale and more complex societies by creating the larger, denser populations without which they could not have occurred. The variation observed in the degree and nature of centralization as well as the extremely long time lag between the onset of the Neolithic and the emergence of supra-local centralized communities in some regions, however, make it clear that regional demographic and political centralization is neither a unitary phenomenon nor an automatic consequence of the Neolithic demographic transition. Larger more centralized communities do, nonetheless, owe specific debts to initial Neolithic processes in their regions, since central aspects of their distinctive regional characters are already present in the earliest sedentary agricultural villages that precede them. At least some of these characteristics were quite possibly inherited, in turn, from even earlier hunting and gathering bands.
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Drennan, R.D., Peterson, C.E. (2008). Centralized Communities, Population, and Social Complexity After Sedentarization. In: Bocquet-Appel, JP., Bar-Yosef, O. (eds) The Neolithic Demographic Transition and its Consequences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8539-0_14
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