By unraveling elements of “social complexity”, and decoupling computation from communication, we illustrate that institutional differences in governance had a marked effect on the specific modes and technologies through which prehispanic Mesoamerican peoples communicated across time and space. We take a multiscalar and diachronic analytical frame, in which we look at 30 central places, six macroregions, and Mesoamerica as whole. Here, our focus is on prehispanic Mesoamerica and the means of computation and communication employed over more than three millennia (ca. Although in a general sense across human cooperative arrangements, a basic relationship between these variables undoubtedly exists, more detailed and fine-grained analyses indicate important axes of variability. This correspondence dovetails with the even broader cross-species expectation that the degrees of social complexity and levels of computational communication should closely correlate. Writing has often been put forth as one indicator of civilization. Three examples are used to demonstrate the complexity of graphic communication based on semasiographic principles and test the proposed approach focusing on various forms of Yukpa graphic expressions in Colombia and Venezuela and framed graphic units of the Tiwanaku culture in the Central Andes, Peru. Graphic units are not only studied in relation to each other and on the semantic level, but in the broader context in which they arise. The proposed model provides access to new analytical dimensions that have not been considered in an integrated way so far. Placing emic concepts and epistemologies increasingly at the center of the investigation comes with a rethinking of Western concepts of writing, and a change of perspective.
The aim of this theory and methodology is to understand how and in what ways Indigenous societies communicate and encode knowledge using graphic units. This paper concerns the development of a semiological multidimensional theory and methodology to analyze Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems (GCSs) in Mesoamerica, Amazonia, the Isthmo-Colombian Area and the Central Andes. However, in recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the narrowness of this concept by focusing on Indigenous and pre-Columbian societies, who favore(d) non-glottographic systems over written speech.
Many studies, even those conducted in the field of the Americas, still argue that graphic communication necessarily builds on coding units of speech.
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