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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 water-abundant 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, … [↵][1]1Email: vernon.scarborough{at}uc.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

The hydraulic lift of early states societies