Costly signaling and the dynamics of consumption in the early-modern Atlantic world:the case of clay tobacco pipes.

Summary

For sixty years archaeologists studying the early-modern Atlantic world have relied on the decline in the stem-hole diameters of clay-tobacco pipes to date their sites. But they have been incurious about the causal dynamics responsible for the ocean-spanning secular trend and variation around it. In this paper I draw on costly signaling theory to a build a simple model of change in marketing strategies of producers and the signaling strategies of consumers that might account for the trend. I use data on clay pipes from seventeenth-century Jamestown and other sites in the Chesapeake region to evaluate predictions from the model. Predictions fit for well imported pipes, but less well for locally-made pipes. The lack of fit raises a question: Why might we expect signalers faced with a choice between two or more equally costly but stylistically distinctive signaling strategies, might prefer the one with which their socially salient superiors are more familiar. A tentative answer to that question promises to illuminate causal dynamics behind "identity" not only in the early Chesapeake but in colonial situations more generally.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Evolutionary Theory and Archaeology, Part II: Applications of Human Behavioral Ecology, Macroevolutionary Approaches, and Costly Signaling   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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