British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
Abstract
Small worlds, material culture and ancient Near Eastern social networks
Fiona Coward (RHUL)
The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This paper asks how individual, face-to-face social interactions were 'scaled up' to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern human societies, and when these developments occurred. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in human sociality occurred with the shift to sedentary and agricultural societies in the early Neolithic. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer groups are believed to have had relatively ephemeral social relations based around kin relations and immediate geographical proximity. In contrast, the sedentary hunter-gatherers of the Epipalaeolithic and the village-dwelling agriculturalists of the early Neolithic are thought to display more fixed and permanent social networks based on multiple, heterogeneous relationships. This paper outlines work testing these assumptions through a focused study of the long term development of regional social networks in the Near East. The distributions of different forms of material culture in the archaeological record reflect the social relationships that underpinned processes of trade, exchange and the dissemination of material culture practices and can thus be analysed and described in robust quantitative terms. Here I discuss the long-term developments in social networks in this region and their implications for the evolution of large-scale human societies.