Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory

Earle, Timothy

doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.29.1.39

Cited by 90 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…At the root of the problem is a lack of reliable historical accounts of land tenure transformations. Archaeological data may provide more depth, but it is often difficult to make direct inferences about land tenure norms (Earle, 2000). For these reasons, an alternative approach is necessary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sequential evolution of land tenure norms

Kushnick

Gray

Jordan

2014

Evolution and Human Behavior

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a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oLand tenure norms are fundamental to our understanding of the evolution of human cooperation and the emergence of inequality in large-scale societies. A prime example of niche construction, their emergence transformed the selective pressures facing early cultivators. We use phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the evolutionary trajectories of land tenure norms in 97 Austronesian societies. We defined land tenure norms as the primary means by which people use, possess, and redistribute land. Based on existing ethnographic accounts, we coded each society as having one of the following primary land tenure norms: none (N), group (G), kin-group (K), and individual (I). Our analyses of phylogenetic and geographic signal suggest that vertical transmission patterned land tenure norms to a greater degree than horizontal transmission. We assessed the relative strength of plausible models of land tenure evolution using maximum likelihood analyses with lexical and time-scaled trees. Surprisingly, they revealed strong support for a model that allows sequential gains and losses along the pathway N-I-G-K. Our probabilistic reconstruction of ancestral states decisively rejected the claim that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian society was marked by G or K. Our results demonstrate the power of "virtual archaeology" for revealing the dynamics of social evolution.Crown

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sequential evolution of land tenure norms

Kushnick

Gray

Jordan

2014

Evolution and Human Behavior

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“…An important example is the appearance of private storage (1)(2)(3)(4) and other indicators of individual property (5,6) along with the advent of farming (7,8), one of the greatest technological-institutional revolutions ever experienced by our species.…”

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confidence: 99%

Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bowles

Choi

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

164

125

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The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required-secure individual claims to the products of one's labor-were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers-crops, dwellings, and animals-could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th-and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.agent-based simulation | evolutionary game theory | technical change | institutional change | big history A mong the outstanding puzzles in human social dynamics is the simultaneous emergence and diffusion of novel economic institutions and new technologies. An important example is the appearance of private storage (1-4) and other indicators of individual property (5, 6) along with the advent of farming (7,8), one of the greatest technological-institutional revolutions ever experienced by our species.Economists, archaeologists, and historians often consider advances in technology to be an exogenous driver of innovations in property rights, wealth inheritance practices, or other institutions. Well-studied examples include the social and cultural impacts of the introduction of the horse on the US Great Plains in the 17th century or the sweet potato in the New Guinea Highlands a century later (9, 10). However, the technological and institutional innovations of the early Holocene are difficult to reconcile with this view because, as a number of archaeologists have pointed out (11-13), farming was probably not economically advantageous in many places where it was first introduced. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the productivity of the first farmers (calories per hour of labor including processing and storage) was proba...

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“…Many chiefdoms would actually qualify as sovereign according to the political philosophical defi nition of the state (but not according to the anthropological defi nition). Although the power of chiefs can be substantial in this sense, it is not always sovereign power, often fl uctuating within a group of chiefs (Bellwood 1987: 31-3;Earle 1997;Thomas 1999: 229;Earle 2000;Earle 2002;Renfrew 2007: 152, 164, 173-6). Thus, chiefdoms range enormously in size and scale, and hence the utility of this term has been intensely challenged within the fi eld of anthropology (Pauketat 2007).…”

Section: Contemporary Classifications Of Small-scale Stateless Societiesmentioning

confidence: 99%