Testing Dunnell’s Waste Explanation for Monument Building with an Agent-Based Model

Summary

The construction of shrines, tombs, and other monuments is one of the most puzzling human behaviors from an evolutionary perspective. Building monuments is costly in terms of time and energy, and yet it is difficult to see how it contributes to survival and reproduction. In the late 1980s, Dunnell argued that monument building and other apparently wasteful behaviors are in fact adaptive in environments that are characterized by severe and/or unpredictable perturbations. Such behaviors are adaptive, according to Dunnell, because groups that undertake them will have lower birth rates than groups that do not and therefore will be less likely to experience food shortages in bad years. In addition, wasteful behaviors are adaptive because they represent a reservoir of time and energy that can be devoted to subsistence and/or reproduction in times of difficulty. Here, we report the results of a study in which we tested the waste hypothesis with an agent-based model in which the severity and predictability of environmental threats and the agents’ propensity to waste time and energy were varied systematically. Our results indicate that the situation is not as straightforward as Dunnell imagined.

Cite this Record

Testing Dunnell’s Waste Explanation for Monument Building with an Agent-Based Model. Mark Collard, Brea McCauley, Chris Carleton, André Costopoulos. Presented at The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Washington, DC. 2018 ( tDAR id: 442745)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21586