Measuring Societal Complexity

Discussion

Peter Peregrine:

"It seems clear that societal scale, complexity, and integration have all increased in a roughly linear fashion over the past 12,000 years. Thus, there is clear evidence for unilineal trends in cultural evolution such that societal scale, complexity, and integration all tend to increase over time. The presence of these unilineal evolutionary trends clearly supports the validity of cultural evolutionary research, and contradicts critiques made by scholars such as Goldenwiser (1937), Lowie (1946), Nisbet (1969), and Giddens (1984) that research into unilineal evolution is invalid because such unilineal trends cannot be demonstrated to exist. These data illustrate that unilineal evolutionary trends do exist, and their existence begs the question of why they exist.

...

Societal complexity appears to have increased in a roughly linear fashion over the past 12,000 years, as illustrated in Figures 2.A.7, 2.A.8, and 2.A.9. Figure 2.A.7 shows the mean values of Technological Specialization plotted at 1000-year intervals, while Figure 2.A.8 shows Social Stratification. Both illustrate linear trends with R-squared values of 0.960 and 0.935, respectively. Figure 2.A.9 shows the mean values for the Technology Factor (which sums the Technological Specialization, Social Stratification, Writing and Records, Land Transport, Money, and Political Integration variables) plotted at 1000-year intervals. It, too, illustrates a linear trend with an R-squared value of 0.949. It should be noted that the "dip" at 1000 years ago evident in each plot is probably due to the more complex cases being dropped from the sample once they gain writing and become historic (this should be particularly true in Figure 2.A.9, where the Writing variable is included in the Technology Factor)."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245534439_Atlas_of_Cultural_Evolution)