Have you ever pondered the definition of complexity? This might seem like a strange question. After all, we tend to throw the word out fairly casually, applying it to any number of ideas or situations: a complex crossword puzzle, a complex math problem, the complex workings of the brain, and so on. In these examples, complexity is used to describe something that is tricky, something that is hard for us to understand, something with many interwoven and sometimes confusing parts. How, though, would we apply the term to the social sphere? Suddenly things get a little more - for lack of a better term - complex. It’s easy to grasp the concept of a tricky crossword puzzle clue, but similarly labeling a society as “a tricky one” leaves much to be desired. Clearly, we need to flesh out our definition, but doing that isn’t going to be an easy task. In fact, a straightforward characterization of complex societies has eluded social scientists for many decades, and possibly even centuries.