Common Pool Resourses, Collective Actions, and Landscapes: A Cross-Cultural Evaluation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human modification of the environment with the goal of increasing productivity, variously referred to as landscape transformation, niche construction, environmental engineering, etc., has been recognized and studied by a larger number of scholars across a multitude of disciplines. Yet, much of this research has focused on documenting the physical modifications made to the environment with little orientation toward understanding the social scales at which these modifications were made and the institutional arrangements, if any, that made it possible to enact changes and maintain resultant landscapes. We hold that, regardless of disciplinary orientation, orchestrating physical changes in environments involves solving collective action problems related to the management of Common Pool Resources. Accordingly, in this paper, we analyze the relationship among Common Pool Resources, management scale, institutional strategies, and landesque changes in a large sample of geographical zones and time periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33012