And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in ‘bands’ at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilization. But they are still caught in the same Turgot-like evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of
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