Past EARG Seminars

Evolutionary Anthropology Seminars (EARG): Multi-level social systems in prehistory; or what the rank-size rule really means

28 October 2009 15:00 in Anthropology Seminar Room (D104), Dawson Building

Multi-level social systems in prehistory; or what the rank-size rule really means Taking their lead from the work of Zipf and the New Geography of the 1960s, archaeologists devoted considerable efforts in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the search for regularities in the size distributions of archaeological assemblages. The finding of rank-size rules ­ power laws demonstrating inverse proportion in the relation between site size and frequency ­ was routinely taken to be indicative of the centralization of power in which the single largest site was dominant over its lesser neighbours. Whilst this conclusion may have been valid in the context of the early South American states for which it was commonly assessed, the general form of the rank size rule is shown here to have far wider, generic social implications that depend on universal features of agent interaction. Recent research into processes of fragmentation and coagulation in species demonstrating fission-fusion social systems has shown marked regularities in their group size distributions, with power law forms predominating. Via simulation it is shown that multilevel social systems, in which coherent Œfamily¹ groups are nested within several higher tier groupings, are unique in their ability to generate power law group size distributions directly reminiscent of the rank-size form. This finding is discussed in relation to the spatio-temporal scales that characterised the social systems of Bronze Age Britain and Ireland, as indexed by the distributions of stone circles and other megalithic monuments

Contact r.a.barton@durham.ac.uk for more information

MARG and EARG alternate weeks