Archaeological discussions commonly link the trade and exchange of precious metals, shells, feathers, and other exotics to the demands of a prestige-goods economy (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1978; Earle 1987: 294–297; Hayden 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005; Earle and Spriggs 2015). These claims are sometimes challenged, both at a general (Barrett 2012) and specific level (Kienlin 2015), but attempts to investigate them run into serious difficulties because so many dimensions of prehistoric prestige economies are archaeologically invisible. Some of the goods traded and transacted in these economies are durable enough to survive in the material record, but others are not, and much about the political, social, religious, and aesthetic contexts that gave them social force and meaning were insubstantial or transient and are now beyond recovery.

Some two and a half decades ago, Carole Crumley noted the “almost unconscious assumption of hierarchy-as-order … among social scientists, especially in the area of complex society” (1995: 3). At the time, the prevailing view was that large-scale, complex groups were functionally impossible without a centralized power and hierarchical organization. Yet, Crumley went on, any number of biological and social structures that are hard to characterize as hierarchical are, by most any measure, complex. Drawing from cognitive scientist Warren McCulloch’s (1945) work on the collective organization of the brain, she dubbed these organizations heterarchies, where heterarchy is “defined as the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked, or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways, depending on systemic requirements” (Crumley, 1979: 144; 2015: 1)

A theory developed from New Guinea ethnography that finds status competition to be a conflict-management system also appears to apply to medieval England, where the system was monopolized by elites, and to quotidian life in contemporary Britain, albeit with a reduced reach and through an additional, novel avenue to status. These findings are deployed to discuss viable policy options for moderating environmentally damaging consumption in the contemporary world.

Status consumption is a major threat to environmental sustainability. In this volume, anthropologists and archaeologists explore the implications of status consumption for environmental sustainability across time and space as well as how the current destructive arc might be bent.

The collection of chapters included in this volume denaturalize dominant conceptualizations of status competition and consumption, drawing attention to alternative possibilities. The authors draw on a number of key themes recurring throughout the volume, including issues of governance and societal demographics to theorize diversity in status pursuits.  Roscoe and Isenhour observe that issues of in/equity loom large and point to a number of political and policy-based implications that might help to bend the curve toward more sustainable futures.