Matt Grove (ICEA, University of Oxford)

The social brain hypothesis argues that hominin encephalisation is a result of cognitive demands imposed by complex sociality. Whilst early analyses focused on group size as a simple index of social complexity, indicating correlations between group size and measures of relative brain size, more recent work has sought to define and examine more specific indices such as the importance of the pair bond and the presence of fluid, fission-fusion social systems. The latter are of particular relevance to studies of cognitive archaeology since they rely upon the maintenance of social bonds between individuals in absentia, and thus expand the spatio-temporal scale of social interaction.

The presence of fission-fusion social systems in both modern humans and Pan hints at the deep evolutionary history of this strategy, and raises the possibility of its identification in the archaeological record. This paper hypothesizes that the archaeological signature of fission-fusion sociality, if and where it exists, is likely to be found in the landscape-scale spatial organisation of enduring archaeological sites. A methodology based on recent ecological applications of cluster and cumulative bifurcation analyses is developed with which to test this hypothesis, and is applied to a series of case studies from the Irish Neolithic.