sociopolitical evolution (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Bettinger.

Socio-political development in aboriginal California follows a trajectory quite different from that in much of western North America, culminating in very small socio-political units, in some places independent family groups approximating those characteristic of the Great Basin. The key development leading to this family-level organization was in both places the privatization of stored plant food, which incentivized the intensive use of plant foods (pinyon and acorn) that were abundant but costly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Railey.

Control and manipulation of stored food was an important force driving human social evolution. Among the more distinctive forms of storage facilities are bell-shaped pits, which have a global distribution and were common in ancient north-central China. In this paper, size variation of 86 bell-shaped pits, spanning the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age in China’s Yuanqu Basin, are examined in relation to other evidence of sociopolitical complexity and change. The data show a significant increase in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kohler. Katie Grundtisch.

We briefly explore the history and current use of Gini coefficients, emphasizing the relatively few studies previously completed in archaeology. Then we explore the behavior of this measure against a variety of theoretical distributions, showing that it makes a useful though imperfect statistical summary of interesting phenomena. Finally we present Gini coefficients for a variety of contexts drawn from prehispanic Pueblo societies. Archaeological thought on emerging inequality has tended to...