Modeling Key Socioecological Factors Influencing the Expression of Egalitarianism and Inequality among Foragers

Summary

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

Understanding what favors egalitarian versus non-egalitarian resource access and patterns of behavior is a long-standing topic of interest, with much research narrowing in on potential social and environmental causes. Past modeling exercises have implemented game theoretic and simulation approaches to explore social patterns that may underlay inequality’s emergence with past theory work emphasizing how subsistence resource characteristics also have an impact. Here we build on these past works and implement a theoretically informed agent-based model to explore the scope of impact the economy of scale, abundance, predictability, and heterogeneity in distribution of subsistence resources may have on altering the probability of foragers experiencing inequality. When matched with ethnographic and archaeological cases of foraging societies with inequality, our results point to key interactions between resource characteristics that suggest explanations for both the general pattern of egalitarianism among foragers and the rarer instances of unequal foragers. Particular key results support prior work emphasizing the effect heterogeneity in resource distribution and predictability of resources have for incentivizing inequality even when the cost to defend a resource is high. This preliminary model further provides an extendable baseline for future simulation work and pattern matching with ethnographic and archaeological data.

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): 36138.0