From Stages to Regimes: Material Thresholds and a New Framework for Archaeological Social Change

This paper proposes a renewed framework for the stage-based developmental view of history.

The stage-based developmental view has long been highly compatible with archaeological practice, in which discrete transformations are identified through the appearance and disappearance of specific artefacts and features. Consequently, stage-based models of social development proposed by scholars such as Service and Friedman have exerted a strong influence, particularly in Japanese archaeology, where they continue to be widely employed.

However, within the research history of social evolution theory, the stage-based developmental view that flourished between the 1950s and 1970s is now regarded as a classical framework. Since the 1980s, the rise of complexity theory has led to strong critiques of simple linear and discrete models of change, while since the 2000s discrete transformations have re-emerged as a central topic, now understood as part of composite processes combining linear and nonlinear, continuous and discrete dynamics.

From the perspective of the research history of social evolution theory and social organism theory, this paper proposes the Regime Shift Perspective as an alternative to the traditional stage-based developmental view. Grounded in integrative theories developed in ecology, this perspective conceptualizes discrete transformations as observable transitions occurring within a framework that combines linear and nonlinear, continuous and discrete processes, and provides archaeologically accessible indicators suited to empirical application.

This paper is part of the Material Culture Macroecology (MME) research program.