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Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World
Gary M. Feinman1(
),
),
Keywords:
communication, writing, Mesoamerica, archaeology, computation, polity scale, calendrics, Maya, Aztec
Cite this article:
Feinman GM, Carballo DM.
Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World.
Journal of Social Computing,
2022, 3(1): 91-118.
https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0015
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Writing has often been put forth as one indicator of civilization. This correspondence dovetails with the even broader cross-species expectation that the degrees of social complexity and levels of computational communication should closely correlate. Although in a general sense across human cooperative arrangements, a basic relationship between these variables undoubtedly exists, more detailed and fine-grained analyses indicate important axes of variability. Here, our focus is on prehispanic Mesoamerica and the means of computation and communication employed over more than three millennia (ca. 1500 BCE–1520 CE). We take a multiscalar and diachronic analytical frame, in which we look at 30 central places, six macroregions, and Mesoamerica as whole. By unraveling elements of “social complexity”, and decoupling computation from communication, we illustrate that institutional differences in governance had a marked effect on the specific modes and technologies through which prehispanic Mesoamerican peoples communicated across time and space. Demographic and spatial scale, though relevant, do not alone determine time/space diversity in media of computational communication. This article is part of the theme issue “Evolution of Collective Computational Abilities of (Pre)Historic Societies”.
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Communication, Computation, and Governance: A Multiscalar Vantage on the Prehispanic Mesoamerican World
Gary M. Feinman1(
),
),
Abstract
Writing has often been put forth as one indicator of civilization. This correspondence dovetails with the even broader cross-species expectation that the degrees of social complexity and levels of computational communication should closely correlate. Although in a general sense across human cooperative arrangements, a basic relationship between these variables undoubtedly exists, more detailed and fine-grained analyses indicate important axes of variability. Here, our focus is on prehispanic Mesoamerica and the means of computation and communication employed over more than three millennia (ca. 1500 BCE–1520 CE). We take a multiscalar and diachronic analytical frame, in which we look at 30 central places, six macroregions, and Mesoamerica as whole. By unraveling elements of “social complexity”, and decoupling computation from communication, we illustrate that institutional differences in governance had a marked effect on the specific modes and technologies through which prehispanic Mesoamerican peoples communicated across time and space. Demographic and spatial scale, though relevant, do not alone determine time/space diversity in media of computational communication. This article is part of the theme issue “Evolution of Collective Computational Abilities of (Pre)Historic Societies”.
Keywords:
communication, writing, Mesoamerica, archaeology, computation, polity scale, calendrics, Maya, Aztec
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Publication history
Received: 05 August 2021
Revised: 21 September 2021
Accepted: 27 September 2021
Published:
14 February 2022
Issue date: March 2022
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© The author(s) 2021
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Timothy A. Kohler and David H. Wolpert for inviting us to contribute to this special section and the virtual conference sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute that preceded it. We also acknowledge Darcy Bird for her facilitation of this endeavor. We are grateful to Linda M. Nicholas who drafted the figures and assisted us with the bibliography and other editorial matters. We were constructively informed and assisted by the manuscript’s reviewers. We also greatly appreciate the essential help that we received from all of our colleagues who researched the archaeological contexts that are included in this analysis and then shared their insights, opinions, and publications with us.
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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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