The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is interested in understanding evolving complex social, biological, and physical adaptive systems in a most general sense (see Cowan et al. 1994). Those of us at SFI interested in the evolution of social behavior have tended to focus on either small-scale societies or on specific aspects of more complex societies, such as the economy. The conference providing the genesis for this volume itself evolved from four previous efforts to understand and document the evolution of social and political complexity of the small-scale agricultural groups of the American Southwest
