OFT and EVO-DEVO: Antithetical or mutually beneficial?

Summary

Short-term constraints that motivate people are an important part of the process social and economic change. Proximate decision (optimality or satisficing) models are particularly useful in archaeology because they play upon basic resource needs and costs in situations where behavior cannot be observed directly. These models are not enough, however, to account for the larger processes by which repeated interactions change the nature of the co-evolving species and the conditions of selection across generations. Thus at least two levels of mechanics and their respective temporal domains must be recognized in co-evolutionary studies such as in Niche Construction Theory (NCT). The fact that many of the empirical patterns that attract NCT thinkers come from research based on simpler models such as behavioral ecology testifies to the potentially complementary relations between these distinct levels of theory.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• A Sense of Question: Papers in Honor of James F. O'Connell

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