| Abstract: | Style is viewed as a mode of communication that signals social group identification and helps to maintain boundaries between social groups. A theoretical framework is developed which relates changes in social messaging in the stylistic mode to changes in the sociopolitical organization of chiefly societies. Observable changes in style are specified for situations in which sociopolitical organization becomes more complex through an increase in horizontal differentiation of social units, as well as those in which complexity increases through vertical differentiation. A methodology for quantifying changes in stylistic complexity, using two measures of redundancy and the information statistic H, is outlined. A specific proposition relating changes in sociopolitical and stylistic complexity in chiefly societies is tested using painted ceramic bowls from several late sixth and fifth millennium B.C. sites on the Susiana Plain in Iran. |
