Fissioning, Scalar Stress, and Social Evolution in Early Village Societies

Abstract

Theories of social evolution have predicted that early permanent population concentrations will frequently be unstable, with fissioning the predominant mechanism for resolving intravillage conflict. It has further been suggested that village fissioning will cease with the emergence of higher‐level integrative institutions. These processes have remained archaeologically undocumented. In this article I attempt to identify the village fissioning process in the Formative Period of Bolivia's Titicaca Basin. I conclude that village fissioning took place in the Early Formative, and that it ceased with the emergence of a regional religious tradition in the Middle Formative. These results confirm the utility and applicability of the evolutionary model.

Transdisciplinary Application of Cross-Scale Resilience

“…For the level of early villages, Rappaport [121] developed what he called the "Irritation Coefficient", which described the non-linear scaling relationship between an increase in population size and an increase in sources of irritation, or frequency of disputes. Gregory Johnson dubbed the phenomenon scalar stress, and argued from a social evolution perspective that due to the "Irritation Coefficient", expanding populations will either be forced to fission, and split into smaller and more manageable groups, or a higher-level governing layer capable of mitigating scalar stress will emerge [122].…”

“…Gregory Johnson dubbed the phenomenon scalar stress, and argued from a social evolution perspective that due to the "Irritation Coefficient", expanding populations will either be forced to fission, and split into smaller and more manageable groups, or a higher-level governing layer capable of mitigating scalar stress will emerge [122]. Though archaeological evidence for fissioning in early villages and/or the emergence of a higher-level of institutional complexity is scarce due to the difficulties of data, scalar stress and its role in structuring scale domains of human population sizes remains a widely accepted theory [121,123,124]. The degree of acceptance despite the scarcity of hard evidence stems from work done by a wide array of theorists who have demonstrated that (a) the location of population size "hinge points", or thresholds, are common across human populations situated in very different environmental and cultural contexts; and (b) human cognitive factors such as short-term and long-term memory and limitations in information processing capabilities provide mechanisms for population hinge points [105,107,108,125].…”

Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy

“…Autonomous villages typically treat land as a commons. For example, individuals might have the right to farm somewhere in the village but not to do so in any particular spot (Fried 1967: 113, 129-30;Carneiro 1970: 734-8;Wilson 1988: 3;Lee 1990: 236;Johnson and Earle 2000: 179-80, 191-2;Boehm 2001: 3-4, 93;Roscoe 2002;Bandy 2004;Renfrew 2007: 142;McCall 2009: 161).…”

Life among the tides : recent archaeology on the Georgia Bight : proceedings of the Sixth Caldwell Conference, St. Catherines Island, Georgia, May 20-22, 2011.

“…Attempting to reconstruct past demographic trends is a perennial goal within archaeology (Hassan, 1978;Milner and Oliver, 1999;Cobb and Butler, 2002;Kowalewski, 2003;Bandy, 2004;Kintigh, Glowacki, and Huntley, 2004;Osborne, 2004). Quantity of temporally sensitive objects, such as ceramics, is a common approach, which is not without its dangers.…”