Cooperation and Collective Action

Past archaeological literature on Cupertino theory has emphasised competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group co-operation have been under theorised in favour of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain co-operative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. This is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand co-operation and collective action. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group co-operation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much needed complement to existing research on co-operation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modelling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In this book diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols of complex societies through the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on co-operation in human societies that will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in co-operation research.