The Calculus of Self-interest in the Development of Cooperation: Sociopolitical Development and Risk Among the Northern Anasazi

Kohler, Timothy A.; West, Carla R. Van

doi:10.1201/9780429492587-7

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Agent-based models can be tinkered with and rerun many times. Kohler and Van West (1996) borrow from ethnoarchaeology to evaluate some of their model assumptions, such as the assumption that the household is an appropriate unit of analysis and that households share with neighbors when productivity is high. Comparison of emergent properties of an agent-based model to these ethnoarchaeological assessments in the real world indicates whether or not the operating model rules are on the right track.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Archaeologists are increasingly interested in complexity science because it is explicitly for the study of systems of interacting agents, which is what all human societies are (Kohler 1993;McGlade 1995;Kohler and Van West 1996;Haas 1998;Bintliff 1999;Kohler et al 1999;Bogucki, 2000;Bentley and Maschner 2001;Axtell et al 2002). In the United States, questions in archaeology are regularly being addressed at the Santa Fe Institute, and in Britain there is the Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour (UCL), where one focus is on complexity science applications for archaeology.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The basis of ABM is that each agent acts based on its own local information, with at least some dependence on what other nearby agents are doing, and what they have learned about their world over a series of "time steps." In early models, the rules by which agents acted were often based on ethnography and optimal foraging theory (Kohler and van West 1996;Read 2002).…”

Section: Information Cascadesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Complexity Theory

2014

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research

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Perhaps the one theoretical position available to archaeologists today that has the potential to integrate culture history, processualism, and post-processualism is the study of complexity and complex systems. Not to be confused with political complexity and the rise of social hierarchies, complexity theory is the study of how new complex properties emerge from the interactions of many agents interacting in often quite simple ways. But the properties that emerge from those simple interactions are nonlinear, complex, and not predictable from the study of the individual agents themselves. This chapter follows the recent publication of our book Complex Systems and Archaeology (Bentley and Maschner 2003a), and necessarily recapitulates much of its first three chapters. However, in the few years since that book was published, there was much for us to update, as complexity theory has grown at an accelerated rate (figure 15.1). (1) That commencing as small aggregations they insensibly augment in mass; some of them reaching eventually perhaps a hundred thousand times what they originally were; (2) That while at first so simple in structure as to be almost considered structureless, they assume, in the course of their growth, a continually increasing complexity of structure; (3) That through their early undeveloped state there exists in them scarcely any mutual dependence of parts, these parts gradually acquire a mutual dependence, which becomes at last so great, that the activity and life of each part is made possible only by the activity and life of the rest.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Information Cascadesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Complexity Theory

2014

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research

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“…Many different ethnographers have shown that sharing, exchange, and ritual redistribution were important coping mechanisms for agriculturalists living in the harsh marginal environment of the American Southwest (Connelly, 1979;Ford, 1979). Moreover, archaeologists (Hegmon, 1989;Kohler and Van West, 1996) have also argued for exchange and sharing based models for the prehistoric Hopi and Chaco. Thus, the lowland Virgin Branch Puebloan, who had a very similar subsistence economy to ethnographic tribes, may have also used exchange or sharing as a risk avoidance mechanism.…”

Section: Background Research and Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral ecology and optimality: Seeking alternative views

Ferguson

2016

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports

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a b s t r a c tCompositional analysis were undertaken to understand if Tusayan Virgin Series ceramics were being traded between southern Nevada and the St. George Basin during the Pueblo III period to counteract the loss of a diverse resource base after the collapse of the trade networks with the Arizona Strip. This study suggests that Tusayan Virgin Series ceramics were not traded between the two regions and that ecological models of the economy may not fit preconceived notions of logical responses or optimality. The Uncertainty Avoidance Index is explored as a useful tool for understanding the psychological reasons behind less than optimal behavior.

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“…Strong social networks take time to form and effort to maintain and monitor. Free-riders who avoid that effort can damage this critical social infrastructure when it is most needed(45). A simulation approach could better capture these processes and more clearly resolve social responses to interannual climate variability.…”

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confidence: 99%

Hydroclimate variability influenced social interaction in the prehistoric American Southwest

Gauthier¹

2019

Preprint

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When droughts and floods struck ancient agrarian societies, complex networks of exchange and interaction channeled resources into affected settlements and migrant flows away from them. Did these networks evolve in part to connect populations living in differing climate regimes? Here, I examine this relationship with a long-term archaeological case study in the pre-Hispanic North American Southwest, analyzing 7.5 million artifacts from a 250-year period at nearly 500 archaeological sites. I use these artifacts to estimate how the flow of social information changed over time, and to measure how the intensity of social interaction between sites varied as a function of distance and several regional drought patterns. Social interaction decayed with distance, but ties between sites in differing oceanic and continental climate regimes were often stronger than expected. Accounting for these different regional drivers of local climate variability will be crucial for understanding the social impacts of droughts and floods in the past and present.

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The Calculus of Self-interest in the Development of Cooperation: Sociopolitical Development and Risk Among the Northern Anasazi

Cited by 20 publications

References 2 publications

Complexity Theory

Complexity Theory

Behavioral ecology and optimality: Seeking alternative views

Hydroclimate variability influenced social interaction in the prehistoric American Southwest

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