Excerpt

It is undeniable that human societies have tended to grow in scale and complexity over time, and especially over the past 12,000 years. Understanding this general phenomenon has been and continues to be one of the central pursuits of archaeology, but understanding of the mechanisms behind this basic pattern remains elusive. One reason for this is the rapid development of archaeological method and theory, which has made it possible to reconstruct past social dynamics in great detail. As a result, the unique aspects of each society come to the foreground, encouraging a view of social evolution as myriad sequences of historically contingent events. As a result, generalizations concerning universal patterns in social evolution can seem counterproductive: for any generalization one researcher makes, another can respond with a fine-grained analysis of a specific society which shows how specific and unique details governed the sequence of change in that case (e.g., Pauketat 2007; Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005). Such studies often conclude that local details better explain the evolution of a particular society and thus undermine the validity of general principles or processes.

When this situation is encountered in other fields, a typical solution is “coarse-graining”—stepping back from the details to a level of focus where the behavior of the system becomes more amenable to generalization. So, for example, in physics, the specific trajectories of individual gas molecules in a chamber are the result of myriad contingent events, but the aggregate behavior of many gas molecules is well approximated by the ideal gas law PV = nRT; and in biology, specific episodes of adaptive radiation appear to be historically contingent (Gould 1989; Sallan and Coates 2010), but there are also general patterns in adaptive radiation that Darwinian evolution accounts for readily (Gavrilets and Losos 2009; Gavrilets and Vose 2005). In biology this scale of analysis is known as macroevolution or macroecology (Brown 1995; Sepkoski 2012). In this chapter we suggest that a similar approach is useful for building a general understanding of human social evolution. We examine this process from a high altitude, where societies still vary in their basic properties but the patterns in this variation appear more regular than they do when viewed in close detail. We acknowledge that a wealth of local detail exists and is important for understanding specific trajectories, but argue that there are still regularities amenable to generalization.

We find that a complex systems perspective, which views human societies as dynamic networks of people, energy, and information that exhibit emergent properties related to their structure and functioning, is useful for developing a general understanding of the changes that have occurred in human societies over the past 12,000 years. In this chapter we suggest that it is useful to conceive of cultural evolution as a macroevolutionary process driven by: (1) intrinsic economies of scale in social organization; (2) elaboration of the division and coordination of labor enabled by these economies of scale; and (3) increases in the ability of social networks to capture and distribute energy. We also view cultural macroevolution as a cumulative process in which innovation derives from the recombination of existing elements into new structures, which then become elements for further combinations, and so forth (Arthur 2009; Gell-Mann 2011; Peregrine et al. 2004).

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