Land, War, and Optimal Territorial Size in Neolithic Society: Why New Guineans Rarely ever Occupied the Territories They had Conquered

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Not infrequently, New Guinean warriors managed in war to displace or annihilate the members of a neighboring territory, yet almost never did they then move in and occupy the territory they had won. Instead, they either left it vacant, allowed allies to take it over, or (most commonly) invited the original owners back a couple of years later. This seemingly irrational behavior directs attention to a largely overlooked aspect of neolithic territoriality – the optimal territorial size. In a theater of war, the territorial area that a neolithic polity can control is governed by a trade-off between its capacity to defend members as they move around that territory and the commuting costs incurred to procure the subsistence resources needed to support that defensive capacity. The end result is an optimal territorial size. Neolithic polities have an incentive to maintain this optimum, but should they expand beyond it – for example, by expanding onto a conquered territory – the result is an invidious reduction in defensive strength, a marked increase in subsistence commuting costs, or both.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38799.0