Since the days of V. Gordon Childe, the study of the emergence of
complex societies has been a central question in anthropological
archaeology. However, archaeologists working in the Americanist
tradition have drawn most of their models for the emergence of
social complexity from research in the Middle East and Latin
America. Bernard Wailes was a strong advocate for the importance of
later prehistoric and early medieval Europe as an alternative model
of sociopolitical evolution and trained generations of American
archaeologists now active in European research from the Neolithic
to the Middle Ages. Two centuries of excavation and research in
Europe have produced one of the richest bodies of archaeological
data anywhere in the world. The abundant data show that
technological innovations such as metallurgy appeared very early,
but urbanism and state formation are comparatively late
developments. Key transformative process such as the spread of
agriculture did not happen uniformly but rather at different rates
in different regions. The essays in this volume celebrate the
legacy of Bernard Wailes by highlighting the contribution of the
European archaeological record to our understanding of the
emergence of social complexity. They provide case studies in how
ancient Europe can inform anthropological archaeology. Not only do
they illuminate key research topics, they also invite
archaeologists working in other parts of the world to consider
comparisons to ancient Europe as they construct models for cultural
development for their regions. Although there is a substantial
corpus of literature on European prehistoric and medieval
archaeology, we do not know of a comparable volume that explicitly
focuses on the contribution that the study of ancient Europe can
make to anthropological archaeology.
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