Leveraging Behavioral Ecology to Understand the Relationship between Resource Availability and Human Violence

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Violence is a pervasive feature of human prehistory, and its traces can be found throughout the archaeological record. Collective violence has important effects on individual survival and is thought to play a critical role in the evolution of complex social systems. However, participation in coalitionary violence elicits a collective action problem and entails high costs. As such, anthropologists have devoted considerable attention to what adaptive payoffs explain the evolution of coalitionary violence. Despite gains in this field, researchers struggle to understand the socioecological conditions that promote violence. In this talk, we argue that behavioral ecology (BE) offers key insights into the emergence and persistence of collective violence and relate changes in resource conditions to variation in rates of violence. I argue that the current evidence suggests that the adaptive payoffs for violence are increasingly motivated by resource acquisition as societies transition from foraging, to farming, to complex states. Rather than assume this relationship indicates starvation-induced conflict, we use logic from BE to suggest that resources become paramount because they can be owned, accumulated, and ultimately translated into fitness benefits. I demonstrate this relationship using a cross-cultural archaeological and ethnographic database and contemporary homicide data from the United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35751.0