caa a22 4500 44536226X CHVBK 20180317142918.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170323e20110901xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s10963-011-9048-4 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s10963-011-9048-4 Shennan Stephen Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Sq, WC1H 0PY, London, UK aut Social Evolution Today [Elektronische Daten] [Stephen Shennan] While Gordon Childe's synthetic descriptive works of Near Eastern and European prehistory have long been overtaken, his social evolutionism remains of interest. His concept of social evolution was not dogmatically unilinear. It involved branching differentiation and diffusion and an acknowledged role for what he called ‘the Darwinian formula of "variation, heredity, adaptation and selection”' in the understanding of cultural change. Moreover, unlike many later archaeological neo-evolutionists, he regarded the social evolutionary schemes of comparative anthropology as broad guiding frameworks whose implications were to be tested by archaeology, rather than as providing a series of stages into which the archaeological material was to be slotted. Those approaches have mostly lost their credibility in archaeology in the last 20years, leaving much of the discipline without a very clear agenda, despite the continuing importance of the issues that the evolutionists were trying to address. This paper argues that developments in evolutionary anthropology and institutional economics over the last 25years provide a basis for an updated and theoretically powerful approach to characterising social evolution and explaining the patterns identified in terms of well-founded micro-scale processes which would not be out of keeping with Childe's own perspective. Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2011 Childe nationallicence Social evolution nationallicence New institutional economics nationallicence Origins of agriculture nationallicence Wealth inheritance nationallicence Journal of World Prehistory Springer US; http://www.springer-ny.com 24/2-3(2011-09-01), 201-212 0892-7537 24:2-3<201 2011 24 10963 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-011-9048-4 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-011-9048-4 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Shennan Stephen Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Sq, WC1H 0PY, London, UK aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of World Prehistory Springer US; http://www.springer-ny.com 24/2-3(2011-09-01), 201-212 0892-7537 24:2-3<201 2011 24 10963 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer