Implications of human behavioral ecology for understanding complex human behavior: Resource Monopolization, package size, and turquoise

摘要

Human behavioral ecology recognizes that individual behavior is an important part of human adaptability. Shaped by evolution by natural selection, humans possess cognitive mechanisms that influence learning and decision making and that generally guide our behavior toward adaptive solutions. Behavioral ecologists most often develop models to explain the ways in which humans achieve reproductive success, but the capacity for goal-oriented, rational behavior can also play an important role in the development of complex social and political relationships, many of which do not so obviously enhance fitness. In this article, concepts of behavioral ecology are employed to derive a model of how, in certain contexts, individual decision making promotes the importance of "prestige goods " that characterize the emergence of sociopolitical differentiation in many societies. In particular, concepts of tolerated theft, package size, and resource monopolization are employed to demonstrate under what conditions prestige goods would be expected to become important. This is illustrated through an examination of turquoise artifacts and their role in the sociopolitical elaboration of Chaco-era Puebloan people of the American Southwest.