What’s Mind is Yours: Intersubjectivity and Social Complexity in the Cycladic Early Bronze Age

This presentation investigates the role of material culture in the development of human intersubjectivity and emergent complexity in the context of the Cycladic Early Bronze Age.The term social complexity has largely functioned as a means of repackaging passé notions of barbarism, civilisation, and progress into more acceptable academic terminology. The concept tends to reflect our own deeply embedded narratives and biases about political and economic organisation (social stratification, inequality, states, etc.), which are reified through typologies of sufficiently advanced characteristics to warrant the label “complex.” The very fact that the term “complex” is popularly received as a positive label, versus a neutral, empirical description reveals the degree to which the word is enmeshed with ideas of sophistication and progressive development. Nonetheless, from a purely physical perspective, human history has thus far demonstrated increasing complexity measurable in terms of the density and intensity of energy-matter flows within systems. If we are to eschew progressivist narratives, how then should we explore such scalar transformations in the organisation of societies? This presentation argues that part of the answer resides in the understanding that social complexity is an emergent property of human social cognition. However, we must also eschew teleological evolutionary narratives and the conceptual biases of western individualism entrenched in the study of cognition if we are to avoid further reductive and teleological pitfalls. To this end, I will discuss how Cycladic marble sculpting shaped the development of attention, skill, and the semiotics of value to coordinate social interactions across multiple scales of organisation.