Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies

Abstract

Warfare is commonly viewed as a driving force of the process of aggregation of initially independent villages into larger and more complex political units that started several thousand years ago and quickly lead to the appearance of chiefdoms, states, and empires. Here we build on extensions and generalizations of Carneiro's (1970) argument to develop a spatially explicit agent-based model of the emergence of early complex societies via warfare. In our model polities are represented as hierarchically structured networks of villages whose size, power, and complexity change as a result of conquest, secession, internal reorganization (via promotion and linearization), and resource dynamics. A general prediction of our model is continuous stochastic cycling in which the growth of individual polities in size, wealth/power, and complexity is interrupted by their quick collapse. The model dynamics are mostly controlled by two parameters, one of which scales the relative advantage of wealthier polities in between and within-polity conflicts, and the other is the chief's expected time in power. Our results demonstrate that the stability of large and complex polities is strongly promoted if the outcomes of the conflicts are mostly determined by the polities' wealth/power, if there exist well-defined and accepted means of succession, and if control mechanisms are internally specialized.

A theory of discrete hierarchies as optimal cost-adjusted productivity organisations

“…Over the past millennia, even more complex, large scale interconnected societies have evolved, shaped into cultural, economic, political and corporate hierarchies [3,4]. Explanations for the benefits of hierarchical organisation are manifold, such as advantages in warfare and multilevel selection [3,5], optimal search properties [6], robustness [7], effective use of resources [3] and so on. But a framework to quantitatively relate the specific hierarchical structures to the functions and constraints facing different types of society has been lacking.…”

Models of coalition or alliance formation

“…For Gavrilets et al (2010), this observation justifies costs that are proportional to the probability of a loss for the eventual winner.…”

“…Most recently, Gavrilets et al (2010) have built an agent-based model of the evolution of societal complexity driven by warfare. In their model, agents are spatially structured autonomous local communities (e.g., villages), whereas coalitions (e.g., chiefdoms) are represented as hierarchical trees that go through processes of coagulation and fragmentation.…”

The role for simulations in theory construction for the social sciences: case studies concerning Divergent Modes of Religiosity

“…Despite our knowledge that human behavior is governed to a non-negligible extent by culturally acquired social norms and institutions, there is still a relative lack of models that describe their evolution. Evolutionary models of cultural change (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1985) have tended to consider changes in the frequency of culturally transmitted individual-level traits, but only more recently have such models addressed the evolution of enduring higher-order institutional complexes (see, for example, Gavrilets Anderson, & Turchin, 2010;Ostrom, 2005;Shennan, 2009;van der Leeuw & Kohler, 2007). The conditions favoring the enforcement of social norms within communities are captured to some extent by the literature on the evolution of punishment in the evolutionary theory of cooperation (e.g., Axelrod, 1986;Boyd, Gintis, & Bowles, 2010), but it is clear that these models only begin to scratch the surface of the potential complexity of human cultural rule systems (Hill, Barton, & Hurtado, 2009).…”