Book ChapterDOI
Who Benefits from Complexity? A View from Futuna
Brian Hayden,Suzanne Villeneuve +1 more
- pp 95-145
TLDR
In this article, the authors discuss the origins of socioeconomic inequality and the role of the elite in the process of economic inequality, which is one of the most important theoretical issues in archaeology.Abstract:Â
Who benefits from complexity? Is it the general populace as systems theorists and functionalists would have it, or is it the elites as Marxists would have it? And if the latter, is it the warriors? the priests? the political big men or chiefs? This issue is critical for understanding the origins of socioeconomic inequality, one of the most important theoretical issues in archaeology being discussed today.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture. Jacques Cauvin and Trevor Watkins.: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research: Vol 326
TL;DR: In this paper, the origins of agriculture in the Levant and the diffusion of the Neolithic process are discussed, and a geographical and chronological framework for the first stages of diffusion is presented.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Century of Feasting Studies
Brian Hayden,Suzanne Villeneuve +1 more
TL;DR: The study of feasting has gradually emerged from early descriptions and bewilderment to more sophisticated attempts to understand the logic and reasons behind the often lavish displays as discussed by the authors, and various models have been, and still are, used by anthropologists and archaeologists to explain this unique human behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives
David W. Anthony,Don Ringe +1 more
TL;DR: Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000 years BCE.
Journal ArticleDOI
An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism
Simon T. Powers,Laurent Lehmann +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown that voluntary leadership without coercion can evolve in small groups, when leaders help to solve coordination problems related to resource production, and this model predicts that the transition to larger despotic groups will occur when surplus resources lead to demographic expansion of groups.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Outline of a Theory of Practice
TL;DR: Bourdieu as mentioned in this paper develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Theory of the Origin of the State: Traditional theories of state origins are considered and rejected in favor of a new ecological hypothesis
TL;DR: The circumscription theory in its elaborated form explains why states arose where they did, and why they failed to arise elsewhere, and shows the state to be a predictable response to certain specific cultural, demographic, and ecological conditions.
Book
Man the Hunter
Richard B. Lee,Irven DeVore +1 more
TL;DR: Man the Hunter as discussed by the authors is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world, which is a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.
Book
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity
TL;DR: Rappaport as mentioned in this paper argues that religion is central to the continuing evolution of life, although it has been been displaced from its original position of intellectual authority by the rise of modern science.