Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation and challenges the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that large-scale anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly a recent phenomenon.One Sentence Summary: A map of synthesized archaeological knowledge on land use reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago.

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The study of developing complex societies can fruitfully focus on the human interactions that define communities, which have always been at the heart of settlement pattern research. Yet little attention has been paid to how communities of varying scales can actually be identified in archaeological survey data. Most often sites have simply been assumed to correspond to communities, although this practice has been criticized. Methods are offered to delineate communities at different scales systematically in survey data, and their implications for field data collection strategies are explored comparatively for cases from northeast China, Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes.

Comparative study of early complex societies (chiefdoms) conjures visions of a cultural evolutionary emphasis on similarities and societal typology. Variation within the group has not been as systematically examined but offers an even more productive avenue of approach to fundamental principles of organization and change. Three widely separated trajectories of early chiefdom development are compared here: the Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico), the Alto Magdalena (Colombia), and Northeast China. Archaeological data from all three regions are analyzed with the same tools to reveal variation in human activities, relationships, and interactions as these change in the emergence of chiefly communities. Patterning in this variation suggests the operation of underlying general principles, which are offered as hypotheses that merit further investigation and evaluation in comparative study of a much larger number of cases.comparative study ͉ social hierarchy S upralocal communities organized around institutionalized social inequalities emerged repeatedly and independently around the world between about 1,000 and 7,000 years ago. The earliest such societies, often broadly labeled chiefdoms, frequently, but not always, came into existence after the establishment of sedentary agricultural living. This fundamental transformation in human social organization was speculated about by mid-19th-century cultural evolutionists on the basis of comparative ethnography, and it has been more directly documented by archaeological research since the mid-20th century. Comparative study has drawn heavily on earlier cultural evolutionary work, sharing its focus on similarities and universals. Hierarchical relationships, of course, have deep roots in dominance behavior in the human (and other) species, and the institutionalization of such relationships provides effective organization, especially at large social scales. That such institutions have appeared repeatedly in human history is no surprise, but we do not fully understand just how they came to emerge when and where they did, and not in other times and places. We are also increasingly aware that early chiefdom communities did not all take the same form and did not all emerge in the same way. There are indications that this variation is not just idiosyncratic detail, and that comparative study of its patterning can provide insight into the developmental dynamics of institutionalized social hierarchy. Ironically, the very richness of information that has brought about this realization is itself an impediment to effective comparative study, which finally will need to draw on the social trajectories of dozens of regions. When a recent comparison of seven early civilizations runs over 750 pages, one despairs of ever seeing the forest for the trees. Here, we look at three regions, focusing on changing activities, relationships, and interactions in human communities where inequalities emerged and became institutionalized.

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