Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The proximate cause for Greg's interest in prehistory involved his effort to design a course on comparative economic institutions at Simon Fraser University during the late 1990s. This course was aimed at second and third year students who had seen some basic economics but had no math background beyond high school algebra. The goal was to use case studies of small-scale communities or societies to illustrate how economic reasoning can help to explain social behavior. A core element of this course was (and still remains) Johnson and Earle's book The Evolution of Human Societies (2000), which includes 19 case studies of anthropologically observed societies, ranging from mobile foraging bands to densely populated agrarian states. Greg's earliest attempts to model the emergence of agriculture and inequality began as lecture notes for this course"--