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Open Access

Applying Gregory Johnson’s Concepts of Scalar Stress to Scale and Information Thresholds in Holocene Social Evolution

Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99163, USA, and also with Terrestrial Archaeology Division, SEARCH Inc., Pensacola, FL 32503, USA
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Abstract

Although Gregory Johnson’s models have influenced social theory in archaeology, few have applied or built upon these models to predict aspects of social organization, group size, or fissioning. Exceptions have been limited to small case studies. Recently, the relationship between a society’s scale and its information-processing capacities has been explored using the Seshat Databank. Here, I apply multiple-linear regression analysis to the Seshat data using Turchin and colleagues’ 9 “complexity characteristics” (CCs) to further examine the relationship between the hierarchy CC and the remaining 8 CCs which include both aspects of a polity’s scale and aspects of what Kohler et al. call “collective computation”. The results support Johnson’s ideas that stratification will generally increase with increases in a polity’s scale (population, territory); however, stratification is also higher when polities increase their developments in information-processing variables such as texts.

Keywords

hierarchyscalar stressSeshat Databankmultiple imputationmultiple regression

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Journal of Social Computing
Volume 3 Issue 1,
March 2022
Pages 38-56
DOI: 10.23919/JSC.2021.0017
Cite this article:
Ellyson LJ. Applying Gregory Johnson’s Concepts of Scalar Stress to Scale and Information Thresholds in Holocene Social Evolution. Journal of Social Computing, 2022, 3(1): 38-56. https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0017

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Received: 05 August 2021
Revised: 18 October 2021
Accepted: 20 October 2021
Published: 14 February 2022
© The author(s) 2021

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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