Organizational complexity and demographic scale in primary states.

David S Sandeford

doi:10.1098/rsos.171137

Abstract

The relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale is an enduring research problem at the intersection of the natural and social sciences and has far reaching implications for the study of social evolution, particularly the emergence and collapse of complex social organizations such as chiefdoms, states and empires. Anthropological models of social evolution universally assume that population growth plays a critical role in the development of organizational complexity; however, the relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale has not been formalized and cross-culturally validated. There is a rich yet unsystematized body of diachronic organizational and demographic data describing the evolution of organizational complexity in 10 archaeologically known cases of primary state formation. Using this dataset, this essay proposes and tests a complex network model that describes state societies as discrete, self-similar, hierarchical social networks. The model accurately describes how organizational complexity and population scale in all cases. The complex network architecture of state societies suggests that further advances in our understanding of modern social organization may be found by a deeper investigation of the role of human nature in the evolution of human societies.

Highlights

The relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale is an enduring research problem at the intersection of the natural and social sciences and has far-reaching implications for the study of social evolution, the emergence and collapse of hierarchical social organizations such as chiefdoms, states and empires
The complex network model of organizational complexity and demographic scale outlined in this paper provides a theoretical framework that predicts and explains both the qualitative shift from egalitarian to hierarchical social organization and the quantitative relationship between organizational complexity and population, at least in all archaeologically known cases of primary state formation
The organizational and demographic data from the primary states discussed above and the predictions of the complex network model are summarized in table 1

Summary

Introduction

The relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale is an enduring research problem at the intersection of the natural and social sciences and has far-reaching implications for the study of social evolution, the emergence and collapse of hierarchical social organizations such as chiefdoms, states and empires. The theoretical eclecticism of contemporary models of social evolution tends to occlude the fact that these models uniformly assume that population dynamics underwrite—or are at least the best index of—the emergence and collapse of organizational complexity [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25] Despite this long-standing universal recognition, the formal relationship between organizational complexity and demographic scale remains at the level of empirical description rather than theoretical explanation [26]. The complex network model of organizational complexity and demographic scale outlined in this paper provides a theoretical framework that predicts and explains both the qualitative shift from egalitarian to hierarchical social organization and the quantitative relationship between organizational complexity and population, at least in all archaeologically known cases of primary state formation

Assumptions of the complex network model

Methods for calculating societal parameters from archaeological data

Predictions of the complex network model

Case studies

Indus regional centres sites destroyed

Summary and discussion