Societies don’t change in a straight line. Neolithic Europe, from about 8,000 to 4,000 years ago, shows this well. Two researchers built a mathematical model to study what drove the ups and downs.
Dr. Aleksandr Diachenko of the Institute of Archaeology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine teamed up with Dr. Detlef Gronenborn of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology (LEIZA) in Germany. Their study appears in the journal PLOS One.
Archaeologists call repeated phases of growing and shrinking social organization social cycles. Studies covering decades to centuries show societies move toward more organization and then back again. In the archaeological record, these shifts show up as rising and falling diversity in objects people made. Scientists still don’t know how those diversity cycles connect to social change. Diachenko and Gronenborn set out to close this gap.
Why pottery
The team chose pottery because clay vessels survive in large numbers and over long stretches of time. Shapes and decorations vary from one set of finds to the next, and those differences hold clues about the people who made them. The researchers tested their model on thousands of pottery shards from Germany and Ukraine.
The model tracks three things: how people organize pottery making, how people share information, and how the population grows. One algorithm describes slow change, sudden shifts, and the pull of starting conditions. Simulations also picked up short-term swings and delayed chaotic effects on diversity. When potters standardize their work, the model shows less variation in decoration. Scientists call this production bias, and this pattern points to changes in social organization.
Two regions, two stories
The study looked at two cases. The first covers southwestern Germany and the Linear Pottery Culture, about 7,000 years ago. The second covers central Ukraine and the Western Trypillia Culture, about 6,000 years ago. Both places saw fast population growth followed by decline. This is a common pattern among early farming societies in Neolithic Europe.
The behavior behind the pattern differed, though. In Germany, societies became more organized and decoration styles grew more varied at first. Later the variety faded. Ukraine went the other way. As societies became more organized, pottery grew more uniform because craft specialists took over production.
A word of caution
One type of evidence is not enough. Pottery diversity alone doesn’t give a clean picture of social life. Researchers also need population data and facts about how production was organized. They need a rough sense of what the decorations once meant to the people who used them. Chance events and early conditions shape results too. Different causes, such as production habits and the way people copy each other, lead to the same outcome.
So a rise in diversity and a drop in variation both signal growing social organization. The simulation shows the two trends are linked.
What comes next
Diachenko says the field has only started to unpack past social behavior. Linking pottery records with population records looks promising, but scientists must understand the mechanisms before they draw firm conclusions. Gronenborn adds that early farming societies show how populations respond to changes in size, labor organization, and information exchange. He believes the results will eventually inform modern societies in a globalized world.
The team plans to refine the model next. The goal is to learn how shifts toward larger social groups connect with standardization in what people made.