Stone circles and the structure of Bronze Age society

Grove, M. La

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.05.021

Cited by 13 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…These layers appear to map onto ethnographically observed groupings that recur in archaeological (e.g. Grove, 2010b, 2011) and anthropological studies (e.g. Hamilton et al, 2007; Zhou et al, 2005), suggesting that they may be universal features of human social organisation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Modelling mechanisms of social network maintenance in hunter–gatherers

Pearce

2014

Journal of Archaeological Science

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Due to decreasing resource densities, higher latitude hunter-gatherers need to maintain their social networks over greater geographic distances than their equatorial counterparts. This suggests that as latitude increases, the frequency of face-to-face interaction decreases for 'weak tie' relationships in the outer mating pool (~500-strong) and tribal (~1500-strong) layers of a hunter-gatherer social network. A key question, then, is how a hunter-gatherer tribe sustains coherence as a single identifiable unit given that members are distributed across a large geographic area. The first step in answering this question is to establish whether the expectation that network maintenance raises a challenge for hunter-gatherers is correct, or whether sustaining inter-group contact is in fact trivial. Here I present a null model that represents mobile groups as randomly and independently moving gas particles. The aim of this model is to examine whether face-to-face contact can be maintained with every member of an individual's tribe at all latitudes even under the baseline assumption of random movement. Contrary to baseline expectations, the number of encounters between groups predicted by the gas model cannot support tribal cohesion and is significantly negatively associated with absolute latitude. In addition, above ~40 degrees latitude random mobility no longer produces a sufficient number of encounters between groups to maintain contact across the 500-strong mating pool. These model predictions suggest that the outermost layers of hunter-gatherers' social networks may require additional mechanisms of support in the form of strategies that either enhance encounter rates, such as coordinated mobility patterns, or lessen the need for face-to-face interaction, such as the use of symbolic artefacts to represent social affiliations. Given the predicted decline in encounters away from the equator, such additional supports might be most strongly expressed at high latitudes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Modelling mechanisms of social network maintenance in hunter–gatherers

Pearce

2014

Journal of Archaeological Science

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“…A feature of the kind of multilevel societies in place by this time is that they lead to nested hierarchies composed of ever-larger tiers of social grouping (Dunbar 2003;Zhou et al 2005;Grove 2010bGrove , 2010c. Zhou et al (2005), show recurrent groupings at approximately 5, 15, 50, and 150 individuals in both modern hunter-gatherer and sedentary western populations.…”

Section: The Archaeology Of Fission-fusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local objects, distant symbols: fission-fusion social systems and the evolution of human cognition

Grove¹,

Dunbar²

2015

Settlement, Society and Cognition in Human Evolution

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Since the very beginnings of comparative ethnography researchers have noted the presence of discrete groupings within human social systems. In recent decades, study of the parallels between these groupings and those of fission-fusion primate societies has resulted in a body of theory that is potentially applicable to the archaeological and palaeoanthropological records of hominin evolution. Despite this, archaeologists have often been reluctant to attempt reconstructions of Palaeolithic society or incapable of synthesizing the necessary research from apparently incompatible disciplines. The work of Clive Gamble provides a notable exception to this rule, clearly articulating and applying a theory of hominin social change predicated upon the evidence of a series of expansions in the geographical scale of Palaeolithic social interaction. This paper employs Gamble's approach to make a closer examination of the socioecological context of fission-fusion in primate societies, with a particular focus on the cognitive demands of this sophisticated adaptation. A number of the specific cognitive abilities suggested to accompany expanded fission-fusion grouping behaviour depend upon an understanding of both past and future time that is absent or little developed in other primates. Archaeological evidence for the evolution of these abilities is assessed, demonstrating a close alignment with -and providing a deeper understanding ofthe appearance of local hominin networks and the eventual emergence of the social landscape.

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“…A now well-documented feature of human social systems is the often modular and multitiered organization of social networks [2,13,15,[27][28][29]. Examples include of hunter-gatherer social networks [2,27,[30][31][32], small-scale autonomous village societies [29,33], the infrastructure of both ancient and modern cities [34][35][36][37], the internal organization of ancient states and empires [13], and the institutional infrastructure of modern nation-states [36,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. Statistical signatures of these complex social structures are the constant branching structures indicative of self-similarity, and in the scaling behavior of social systems as they increase in size [50].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scaling human sociopolitical complexity

et al. 2020

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Human societies exhibit a diversity of social organizations that vary widely in size, structure, and complexity. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies of a few hundred individuals to complex states of millions, most of this diversity evolving only over the last few hundred years. Understanding how sociopolitical complexity evolved over time and space has always been a central focus of the social sciences. Yet despite this long-term interest, a quantitative understanding of how sociopolitical complexity varies across cultures is not well developed. Here we use scaling analysis to examine the statistical structure of a global sample of over a thousand human societies across multiple levels of sociopolitical complexity. First, we show that levels of sociopolitical complexity are self-similar as adjacent levels of jurisdictional hierarchy see a four-fold increase in population size, a twofold increase in geographic range, and therefore a doubling of population density. Second, we show how this self-similarity leads to the scaling of population size and geographic range. As societies increase in complexity population density is reconfigured in space and quantified by scaling parameters. However, there is considerable overlap in population metrics across all scales suggesting that while more complex societies tend to have larger and denser populations, larger and denser populations are not necessarily more complex.

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Stone circles and the structure of Bronze Age society

Cited by 13 publications

References 60 publications

Modelling mechanisms of social network maintenance in hunter–gatherers

Modelling mechanisms of social network maintenance in hunter–gatherers

Local objects, distant symbols: fission-fusion social systems and the evolution of human cognition

Scaling human sociopolitical complexity

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