Timothy A. Kohler – författare

Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell?Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of wealth disparity.The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early hunter-­gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower levels in their New World counterparts.For the first time, archaeology allows humanity's deep past to provide an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the world.Contributors: Nicholas Ames, Alleen Betzenhauser, Amy Bogaard, Samuel Bowles, Meredith S. Chesson, Abhijit Dandekar, Timothy J. Dennehy, Robert D. Drennan, Laura J. Ellyson, Deniz Enverova, Ronald K. Faulseit, Gary M. Feinman, Mattia Fochesato, Thomas A. Foor, Vishwas D. Gogte, Timothy A. Kohler, Ian Kuijt, Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Mary-Margaret Murphy, Linda M. Nicholas, Rahul C. Oka, Matthew Pailes, Christian E. Peterson, Anna Marie Prentiss, Michael E. Smith, Elizabeth C. Stone, Amy Styring, Jade Whitlam.

As part of the SFI series, this book presents the most up-to-date research in the study of human and primate societies, presenting recent advances in software and algorithms for modelling societies. It also addresses case studies that have applied agent-based modelling approaches in archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, and sociology. Many things set this book apart from any other on modelling in the social sciences, including the emphasis on small-scale societies and the attempts to maximize realism in the modelling efforts applied to social problems and questions. It is an ideal book for professionals in archaeology or cultural anthropology as well as a valuable tool for those studying primatology or computer science.

As part of the SFI series, this book presents the most up-to-date research in the study of human and primate societies, presenting recent advances in software and algorithms for modeling societies. It also addresses case studies that have applied agent-based modeling approaches in archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, and sociology. Many things set this book apart from any other on modeling in the social sciences, including the emphasis on small-scale societies and the attempts to maximize realism in the modeling efforts applied to social problems and questions. It is an ideal book for professionals in archaeology or cultural anthropology as well as a valuable tool for those studying primatology or computer science.

Ancestral Pueblo farmers encountered the deep, well watered, and productive soils of the central Mesa Verde region of Southwest Colorado around A.D. 600, and within two centuries built some of the largest villages known up to that time in the U.S. Southwest. But one hundred years later, those villages were empty, and most people had gone. This cycle repeated itself from the mid-A.D. 1000s until 1280, when Puebloan farmers permanently abandoned the entire northern Southwest. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines how climate change, population size, interpersonal conflict, resource depression, and changing social organization contribute to explaining these dramatic shifts. Comparing the simulations from agent-based models with the precisely dated archaeological record from this area, this text will interest archaeologists working in the Southwest and in Neolithic societies around the world as well as anyone applying modeling techniques to understanding how human societies shape, and are shaped by the environments we inhabit.

It is one of the great mysteries in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late thirteenth-century AD. Considering the numbers of people affected, the distances moved, the permanence of the departures, the severity of the surrounding conditions, and the human suffering and culture change that accompanied them, the abrupt conclusion to the farming way of life in this region is one of the greatest disruptions in recorded history.Much new paleoenvironmental data, and a great deal of archaeological survey and excavation, permit the fifteen scientists represented here much greater precision in determining the timing of the depopulation, the number of people affected, and the ways in which northern Pueblo peoples coped--and failed to cope--with the rapidly changing environmental and demographic conditions they encountered throughout the 1200s. In addition, some of the scientists in this volume use models to provide insights into the processes behind the patterns they find, helping to narrow the range of plausible explanations.What emerges from these investigations is a highly pertinent story of conflict and disruption as a result of climate change, environmental degradation, social rigidity, and conflict. Taken as a whole, these contributions recognize this era as having witnessed a competition between differing social and economic organizations, in which selective migration was considerably hastened by severe climatic, environmental, and social upheaval. Moreover, the chapters show that it is at least as true that emigration led to the collapse of the northern Southwest as it is that collapse led to emigration.

One of the great mysteries in the archaeology of the Americas: the depopulation of the northern Southwest in the late thirteenth-century is considered here with contributions from 15 scientists with access to new paleoenvironmental data. In this volume models are used to provide insights into the processes behind the patterns, helping to narrow the range of plausible explanations.

Tracking Ancient Footsteps celebrates William D. Lipe's five-decade career in Southwestern and conservation archaeology. From the arid expanses of Glen Canyon, the Red Rock Plateau, and Cedar Mesa in Utah, to the relatively lush Dolores Valley and Mesa Verde regions of Colorado, Lipe participated in the key projects defining much of what is known today about the ancient Native American past in the Southwest. And, in 1974, he provided a timely definition for "public archaeology" that influences researchers and land managers to the present time. In Tracking Ancient Footsteps, nine of his close colleagues share their experiences, providing a chronology of one man's life intersecting with our understanding of Southwestern Prehistory, the role of government land-holding agencies, and the archaeological profession as a whole.

How should archaeologists and other social scientists tackle the big and little questions about change in socionatural systems? Although fieldwork is certainly the place to start, it alone is not enough to answer troublesome "how" or "why" questions. To make sense of what they find in the field, archaeologists build models-possible explanations for the data. This book is about new developments in applying dynamic models for understanding relatively small-scale human systems and the environments they inhabit and alter. Beginning with a complex systems approach, the authors develop a "model-based archaeology" that uses specific, generally quantitative models providing partial descriptions of socionatural systems of interest that are then examined against those systems. Taken together, the chapters in this volume constitute an argument for a new way of thinking about how archaeology is (and should be) conducted.