Social Complexity as a Multi-Scalar Concept: Pottery Technologies, ‘Communities of Practice’ and the Bell Beaker Phenomenon

Abstract

Social complexity is typically used to discuss hierarchical socio-political organization and the emergence of elites within society. This paper takes a fundamentally different view, arguing that social complexity can be removed from this strict definition and used to discuss social interactions and networks. Taken more fluidly, social complexity allows for exploration of how social networks intersect across different social scales. The dynamics of Bell Beaker pottery production are used to highlight how various scales of social interaction can be simultaneously discussed in terms of social complexity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Universidad de Sevilla, EDIA Portugal and the University of Cambridge for support and partial funding of this project. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Universidad de Sevilla, especially Víctor Hurtado Pérez, Carlos Odriozola Lloret and Leonardo García Sanjuán. I would also like to thank John Robb, Marc Vander Linden and Cameron Petrie and the two reviewers for reading earlier versions of this paper and providing valuable feedback and discussion. Any mistakes or inflammatory comments are my own.