Investigating Drivers of Technological Richness among Contact-Period Western North American Farmers

Summary

Building on several previous studies we investigate the factors that influence technological richness in nonindustrial farming groups. A number of studies have shown that the factors that influence technological richness and complexity in hunter-gatherer groups differ from the factors that influence farming populations. Specifically, environmental risk is the primary driver in hunter-gatherer technological richness and complexity, whereas population size seems to be the main driver for farmers. Here, we focus on variation in technological richness (total number of material items and techniques) among 37 contact-period nonindustrial farming groups from western North America and test two hypotheses: (1) technological richness is affected by environmental risk (proxies include species richness, annual average precipitation, and average January temperature) and (2) population size is the primary determinant of technological richness. We found technological richness to be negatively correlated with population size and species richness. Additional analyses controlling for shared history confirm these results. Thus, in contrast to previous empirical findings, the primary driver of technological richness of farming groups in western North America is consistent with the environmental risk hypothesis and not consistent with the population size hypothesis.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Evolutionary theory and archaeology, Part I: Cultural transmission, cultural evolution, and evolutionary archaeology

Keywords

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