The hydraulic lift of early states societies.

The trajectory of social complexity is hardly a linear progression, with twists and turns precipitated by unintended consequences, consequences that can be advantageous or deleterious to a society and the biophysical environment that society inhabits. The article by Liu et al. (1) provides clear evidence for a complex set of environmentally altered landscapes principally designed to accommodate sizable populations investing in water management infrastructure and the presumed intensification of paddy field rice production. Of critical merit for an understanding of the social conditions affecting the early archaic state, the site area of Liangzhu concentrates human-modified landscapes, productive resources, and the supporting labor responsible for the initiation of East Asia’s earliest known experiment in truly complex sociopolitical order. At 5,300 y ago, the authors reveal a very different level of social organization, unlike that identified from other regions of East Asia (2) or really anywhere else at a comparable time (3). The monsoonal “wet” setting for neolithic Liangzhu culture (3300–4300 BP) was a gravitational pull, preadapting the society to a waterabundant region that required a different kind of investment in landscape engineering (4) compared with the much better-known water infrastructure reported at the other end of the continent—the Near East—and its “dry” environmental context (5). Although several forces beyond water management combine to precipitate the myriad of emergent social orders that result in social complexity, settings with either an overabundance of water or its sparse availability likely influenced the manner in which the archaic state was manifest. Within these contexts, the uncertainty associated with the severity of acute flooding compared with long or frequent drought-like conditions both resulted in landscape modifications and complicated spatial relationships, although demonstrably different from one another. Karl Wittfogel’s controversial “hydraulic hypothesis” (6) that stridently professed water control as the primary triggering agent for the earliest states globally has been denounced by most members of the academic community as far too deterministic. Although a half-century old, it nevertheless continues to be a citation when issues of social complexity are addressed. Given the ever-increasing role that diminishing freshwater access is having on our current planetary boundaries (7, 8), Wittfogel’s thesis with its causal and controversial simplicity seems to partially rise or precipitously fall within each passing decade since its introduction in the late 1950s. This article again provides that forum, implicitly justified by the authors, in part, because Wittfogel was a trained sinologist before going global with his theory. One of the principal objections to the hypothesis has been the timing of the first estates or state-like managers and the resulting institution of kingship in Mesopotamia. Drawing from years of directed fieldwork, laboratory assessment, and several highly influential publications, Robert M. Adams (9) and his teams demonstrated that the southernmost Mesopotamian cities and related indicators of societal scale and complexity frequently predated large canalization efforts. Early Sumerian “states” were contemporary with Liangzhu developments; however, in the latter case, the authors herein indicate that significant aspects of the complex hydraulic infrastructure resulting in high dam construction appeared several hundred years before sophisticated urban development Fig. 1. A contemporary ritualized landscape of rice paddy terracing on the island of Bali, Indonesia. Reprinted from ref. 17, Copyright (2003) National Academy of Sciences, USA.