Cultural and evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in archaeological perspective / David M. Carballo -- The emergence of social complexity : why more than population size matters / Gary M. Feinman -- War, collective action, and the "evolution" of human polities / Paul Roscoe -- The ritualized economy and cooperative labor in intermediate societies / Charles Stanish -- Reconsidering Darwinian anthropology : with suggestions for a revised agenda for cooperation research / Richard E. Blanton and Lane F. Fargher -- Agency and collective action : insights from North American historical archaeology / Dean J. Saitta -- Free-riding, cooperation, and population growth : the evolution of privatization and leaders in Owens Valley, California / Jelmer W. Eerkens -- Cooperation and competition among late Woodland households at Kolomoki, Georgia / Thomas J. Pluckhahn -- The competitive context of cooperation in pre-Hispanic Barinas, Venezuela : a multilevel-selection approach / Charles S. Spencer -- Water control and the emergence of polities in the southern Maya lowlands : evolutionary, economic, and ecological models / Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell and Lisa J. Lucero -- Labor collectives and group cooperation in pre-Hispanic central Mexico / David M. Carballo -- Caste as a cooperative economic entitlement strategy in complex societies of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa / Monica L. Smith -- The dynamics of cooperation in context : concluding thoughts / Gary M. Feinman.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
"Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under-theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, and evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated that humans effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains a great conundrum in evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much-needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In Cooperation and Collective Action, diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols in complex societies over the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on cooperation in human societies and will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in cooperation research"--