Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Every human decision involves an aspect of risk. As such, it is critically important that anthropologists develop a general framework for defining and explaining risk-sensitive behavior. Human behavioral ecology (HBE) has long been interested in understanding the conditions under which individuals should be risk-averse, risk-prone, or risk-indifferent. HBE has made great strides in risk-oriented research by formally defining risk as probabilistic variance and seeking to explain risk-preferences from an explicit cost/benefit framework. Nonetheless, the last attempt to synthesize an HBE approach to risk was Elizabeth Cashdan’s landmark edited volume *“Risk and Uncertainty in Tribal and Peasant Economies” published in 1991. We believe, 30 years later, it is time again to synthesize HBE approaches to risk. This organized session will highlight current archaeological investigations into risk. Our goal is to provide an explicit—and hopefully consistent—HBE framework for understanding risk and to discuss the ways in which risk-sensitive research has changed over the last several decades.