In the jungle of cultural complexity

Abstract

First paragraph: The jungle—an area overgrown with dense forest and tangled vegetation—is not unlike the concept of complexity within cultural evolutionary research. The notion of complexity has been used across many branches of cultural evolutionary research to describe and explain key concepts, such as cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) and "complex" cognition. However, whilst interest from diverse research areas has enriched the literature, it has also led to a dense network of inconsistencies, which need to be addressed. What are researchers from different areas trying to describe and capture when they refer to "complexity"? The Culture Conference 2018 aimed to provide a platform in which researchers from different disciplines could further integrate their ideas and begin to untangle their views on the relevance and use of this concept.