Big House on the Prairie?: Signal Quality across Multi-ethnic Homesteading Contexts in the Central Plains (USA)

Summary

Homesteaders colonizing central Nebraska (Central Plains, USA) in the late 1800s constructed communities that varied in terms of ethnic heterogeneity as well as across other dimensions. Costly signaling tenets explored to date suggest that for multi-lingual and multi-ethnic communities, we expect material culture, in this case, homestead size and ornateness, to index family capacities; in linguistically and ethnically homogenous communities, such a material signal may have had less saliency. Relying on lidar data and historic documents, I evaluate this proposition and also consider confounding factors, such as the rapidly unfolding nature of the homesteading experience, homesteader mode of production and the homesteading exit strategies implemented by some homesteaders.

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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

Spatial Coverage