Size, Complexity, and Organizational Variation: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

In 1963, Melvin Ember illustrated the overarching cross-cultural relationship between societal scale (specifically, maximal community size) and hierarchical complexity. Yet this study (and subsequent ones) found much less regularity in the size-complexity relationship when focused down on human groupings of less extensive/narrower size ranges. Here, it is argued that this lack of a more precise fit requires the consideration of a third key parameter, different modes of integration or interpersonal connectivity. Comparative findings (both synchronic and diachronic) are marshaled to make the case that integrative differences mediate the overarching relationship between demographic size and political complexity. It is proposed that when they are small, groups that operate more collectively often dampen the emergence of decision-making hierarchies; alternatively large, more collective, or democratic formations may necessitate greater administrative or hierarchical political complexity per capita than is found in more autocratic groups of comparable size.

What does the bell-distribution hide? Spatial behavior and demographic development of the Funnel Beaker culture populations in Bronocice region, Poland

“…Recent studies in paleodemography presented archaeological and ethnographical evidence that cannot be explained from the perspective of simple relationships between group size, environment, subsistence strategies, or socio-political organization (Diachenko and Zubrow 2015;Fletcher 2006;Hamilton et al 2007a;2007b;. Different forms of economy and social organization can overlap the deep non-linear trends in demographic development (Duffy 2015;Feinman 2011;. The formation of low-level social hierarchy in Bronocice micro-region does not contradict the results of our simulations.…”

Transdisciplinary Application of Cross-Scale Resilience

“…Subsequent work has shown that while the relationship between size and complexity is in general true, it can break down at narrow demographic ranges, as local context becomes more critical in structuring populations and their complexity [126] and this is congruent with the discontinuity hypothesis. A discontinuity analysis on archaeological data would be revealing of the key scale domains within which human populations fall, particularly as it uses raw data while previous work on archaeological data has used binned data, which can muddy the ability to find break points or clusters in rank-ordered data [108,126].…”

“…If a discontinuity analysis detected similar aggregations of population sizes across disparate environments and cultures, this would indicate that the processes scaling populations are general to all humans, which would suggest that they are based on conservative patterns in primate evolution. One alternative is that some scales of aggregation are structured by primate evolution, while others may be more contingent on regional context, be it environmental or social, that nonetheless ought to be persistent and characteristic across types of environmental constraints or human political organization (e.g., collective leadership vs. autocratic leadership) [126]. Another alternative is that it may only be appropriate to apply discontinuity analysis and the cross-scale model to populations at regional scales, as is the case when applying these methods to ecological systems.…”

“…A discontinuity analysis on archaeological data would be revealing of the key scale domains within which human populations fall, particularly as it uses raw data while previous work on archaeological data has used binned data, which can muddy the ability to find break points or clusters in rank-ordered data [108,126]. If human population sizes are structured by key processes operating at discrete spatial and temporal scales as Kosse [105] and others have suggested [107], then a resilience assessment could be conducted using the complexity variables already well-established in the archaeological literature [126]. Resilience could be synonymous, for example, with locational persistence at a comparable complexity, and its correlation with diversity and redundancy of environmental resources or social networks, or any other factors deemed critical for long-term persistence could be tested.…”

An exercise in archaeological demography: estimating the population size of Late Neolithic settlements in the Central Balkans

“…Its role is especially prominent in approaches grounded in processual archaeology and evolutionary archaeology. In the processual perspective, its importance stems from the fact that population size (and density) is highly correlated with socio-cultural complexity and plays a key role in domains related to subsistence and cultural ecology in general (Binford 2001;Carneiro 1962;1986;Ember 1963;Feinman 2011;Johnson and Earle 2000;Johnson 1982;Kosse 1990;1994;Peregrine et al 2004). In evolutionary archaeology, population size is important because cultural evolutionary theory views culture as a population phenomenon -it deals with processes at the population level (Boyd and Richerson 1985;O'Brien and Lyman 2000;Richerson and Boyd 2005;Shennan 2002).…”