Resource Variability, Risk, and the Structure of Social Networks: An Example from the Prehistoric Southwest

Abstract

Social interactions within a region may reduce the risk of resource stress by facilitating access to resources in other areas. Archaeological implications of this view of social networks are considered for the part-agricultural inhabitants of central New Mexico during the Pithouse period (ca. A.D. 900—1250). Spatial patterning of climatic variables suggests that social networks at least 50 km in extent and oriented in an east-southeastern direction from the focal site toward the Sierra Blanca region could have provided access to extralocal resources during years of poor local productivity. Similarity of ceramic assemblages (measured by Brainerd—Robinson coefficients) between the focal site and sites in the proposed alternative resource area confirms some degree of social contact during the Pithouse period; dissimilar ceramic assemblages from comparably distant sites to the west (in the Socorro area) indicate that geographic distance alone is not a good predictor of social interactions in this region.

Bet-hedging strategies, agricultural change, and unpredictable environments: historical development of dryland agriculture in Kona, Hawaii

“…138-139) considers risk as a potential cause of intensification, and intensification as a means of reducing risk, but largely dismisses the concept because of the difficulties of measurement. Numerous examples from the literature, however, demonstrate ways in which risk can be measured, along with the attendant human responses (e.g., Halstead and OÕShea, 1989;Kennett and Kennett, 2000;Ladefoged and Graves, 2000;Larson et al, 1996;Madsen et al, 1999;Rautman, 1993).…”

Analyzing and interpreting ceramic production and distribution in the American southwest

“…What has yet to be done is the development of this model in relation to environmental variation to account for variable aspects of production and exchange through time and space. Rautman (1995) has recently offered an intriguing model drawn from evolutionary ecology of information exchange across environmental boundaries that might also highlight useful interpretive directions for the Ceramic Production in the American Southwest 269 study of ceramic production and exchange. She postulates that where variation in the environmental characteristics of two regions is negatively correlated in time, interaction (including, exchange of resources and possibly individuals) between groups from each of the two regions buffers individuals in one region's poor resource years against the other's good years and vice versa.…”

Initial source evaluation of archaeological obsidian from the Kuril Islands of the Russian Far East using portable XRF

“…Personal relationships between human groups are a social means for circumventing the local subsistence and material resource constraints that are inherent to geographically isolated environments (Mackie, 2001;Rautman, 1993). The presence of non-local obsidian in the Kuril Islands from Hokkaido and Kamchatka sources over a period of almost 2000 years is evidence of a long-term and long-distance network for the transportation and/or trade of obsidian, similar to obsidian networks that existed in other parts of northeast Asia during the late Pleistocene through the Holocene Kuzmin 2006b;Kuzmin et al, 2000Kuzmin et al, , 2002.…”