Dimensions, Links, and Scales in the Behavioral Ecology of Inequality

Summary

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

Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) initially focused on individual actors optimizing in a single decision category over very short time scales—“Robinson Crusoe rustles up lunch.” Current and future progress in HBE entails several intertwined developments, of which we address three: (a) attending to social dimensions, by drawing on evolutionary social theory (kin selection, n-person games, signaling, etc.) as well as conventional social science (e.g., collective action, property rights); (b) linking different models, which involves careful assessment of assumptions and dynamics of each model, in order to articulate them in a theoretically coherent and productive manner; and (c) expanding time scales from behavioral and ecological to evolutionary scales. We exemplify these developments with a brief summary of research being conducted on Pacific Coast foraging societies. For (a), we discuss how institutionalized inequality is likely to arise when resources are both economically defensible and clumped. This (b) links models of territorial defense, circumscription (ideal-despotic dynamics), and collective action. However, the long lag between initial salmon exploitation and development of hereditary inequality and property rights poses (c) questions that will require the diachronic perspective of archaeological data and analysis.

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): 35985.0