Excerpt

Here we revisit, with new data, tools, and theory, the classic problems engaging social and political theorists since at least the time of Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651): how and why, over the last few thousand years, did the relatively egalitarian foraging bands of our deep prehistory give way to larger-scale societies marked by obvious inequalities in power and wealth? Although the end points of this process may be fairly clear, what’s in the middle remains a muddle. We develop our approach with reference to a specific historical trajectory, yet we suspect this model represents a common path to sociopolitical complexity in the absence of direct competition with larger, more hierarchical groups. Our proof-of-concept model reproduces important aspects of patterns in settlement and conflict seen in the central Mesa Verde region of the Pueblo Southwest in the last half of the first millennium and the early second millennium AD.

Outputs from this model, however, do not map very well into the taxonomies developed by neo-evolutionary studies of the mid-twentieth century (e.g., Fried 1967; Service 1962). This is a little troubling, but on the other hand archaeologists have often lamented the poor fit of concepts like “chiefdom” or “stratified society” to what they see as the facts on the ground in the later pre-Hispanic Southwest (e.g., Haas et al. 1994). In any case, we are more interested here in process than taxonomy.

Clarity, though, requires some vocabulary. The model developed here recognizes three basic kinds of groups beyond the household: simple nonhierarchical groups, simple hierarchical groups, and complex hierarchical groups composed of multiple groups. We build an evolving ecosystem of households within these three types of groups that has no preordained end point. What happens in any specific run is strongly conditioned by structural factors such as resource distribution and abundance, population sizes of groups, and distribution of groups; “history” (here, any factor that structures subsequent development) also plays an important role. In this model the households within a group can be expected to have only modest internal differences in power or wealth. This is in keeping with the characteristics of the local archaeological record, which seems to attest to societies with a bias toward relative equality at least through the Pueblo I period (ending ~AD 890; Kohler and Higgins 2016). After that time, during the period of maximum local influence from Chaco and Chaco-derived societies to the south (~AD 1060–1140), there is good evidence for increasing differentiation of wealth between households (using house size as a proxy for wealth; Kohler and Ellyson 2018). Little is known about differences in wealth between groups, although the simulation reported here predicts that such differences might be important after roughly AD 1000. We show that complex groups might become large enough to dominate an area equal in size to the area we simulate. Pauses in conflict seen in the archaeological record of this area therefore might be explainable by suppression of conflict within such a group.

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