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Food for all: An agent-based model to explore the emergence and implications of cooperation for food storage
Abstract
A consistent access to food is paramount for humans at individual and group level. Besides providing the basic nutritional needs, access to food defines social structures and has stimulated innovation in food procurement, processing and storage. We focus on the social aspects of food storage, namely the role of cooperation for the emergence and maintenance of common stocks. Cooperative food stocks are examined here as a type of common-pool resource, where appropriators must cooperate to avoid shortage (i.e. the tragedy of commons). 'Food for all' is an agent-based model in which agents face the social dilemma of whether or not to store in a cooperative stock, adapting their strategies through a simple reinforcement learning mechanism. The model provides insights on the evolution of cooperation in terms of storage efficiency and considering the presence of social norms that regulate reciprocity. For cooperative food storage to emerge and be maintained, a significant dependency on the stored food and some degree of external pressure are needed. In fact, cooperative food storage emerges as the best performing strategy when facing environmental stress. Likewise, an intermediate control over reciprocity favours cooperation for food storage, suggesting that concepts of closed reciprocity are precursors to cooperative stocks, while excess control over reciprocity is detrimental for such institution.
Supplementary resources (5)
... Storage is prominent in diverse theories about the shift from hunting-gathering to food production, plant and animal domestication, sedentism, and the origins of social stratification and political centralization (Angourakis, Santos, Galán, and Balbo, 2014;Earle and D'Altroy, 1982;McCorriston and Hole, 1991;Wesson, 1999). Two reasons appear to be primary: storage is associated with the production of surplus and it commonly is archaeologically visible and measureable. ...
... In effect, households do not have the contingent possibility of adjusting their agricultural strategy as a function of their current state, specifically, their current food stores. We do not consider the social dilemmas of household contributions to cooperative or pooling storage (Angourakis et al., 2014), nor do we attempt here to include in our model important relationships among surplus, storage, socio-economic practices, the distribution of political power or moral understandings of property (Hendon, 2000). We are confident that some of these assumptions will not affect the structural results we describe. ...
... Realistic, evolutionary accounts of the intensification of agrarian production at the expense of foraging, and the development of centralized agrarian societies at the expense of more egalitarian relationships, require that we thoroughly conceptualize the individual mechanisms and processes thought to be involved. Simple models are essential aids in this effort (see also Angourakis et al., 2014). We also seek to demonstrate the importance of combining different types and scales of modeling by focusing on the complementary analytical insights available from behavioral ecology and population ecology, and from analytical and simulation methods. ...
Using complementary behavioural and population ecological models, we explore the role of production risk, normal surplus and inter-annual food storage in the adaptations of societies dependent on seasonal agriculture. We find that (a) household-level, risk-sensitive adaption to unpredictable environmental variation in annual agricultural yields is a sufficient explanation for the origins of normal agrarian surplus and, consequently, of household-level incentives for inter-annual food storage; and, (b) at the population level, density-dependent Malthusian processes tightly constrain the circumstances under which this same mechanism can be effective in smoothing inter-annual fluctuations in household food availability. Greater environmental variation and higher levels of fixed set-asides such as seed requirements or transfer obligations to political authorities lead to more severe, periodic famines; however, outside of famine events, these same factors improve average population welfare by suppressing population density to levels at which Malthusian constraints have lessened impact. The combination of behavioural and population ecological modelling methods has broad and complementary potential for illustrating the dynamic properties of complex, coupled human-natural systems.
... The model is a stylised abstraction of the basic mechanisms that explain the emergence of cooperation. It does not consider food storage facilities or techniques that may condition cooperation (see the review in Angourakis et al.) [25][26][27][28][29] , nor does it introduce other complex assumptions such as social networks or norms. We can claim that the model explores essential questions of classical anthropology regarding the importance of cooperation in human history 30-33 . ...
... While there are simulations that analyse the relative contributions of hunting and gathering to the diet 48 , most models focus on how specific tactics relate to overexploitation 49 or carrying capacities 50 , or on how a given population recovers depending on hunting pressure or overharvesting [51][52][53] . More recently, the role played by cooperation and store efficiency in the emergence and maintenance of common stocks 25 and the influence of excessive abundance of common resources in the context of public goods games 54 have been analysed. However, food storage has not been identified as a spreading strategy in many HG societies and remains a topic that needs further development 55 . ...
We study the influence that resource availability has on cooperation in the context of hunter-gatherer societies. This paper proposes a model based on archaeological and ethnographic research on resource stress episodes, which exposes three different cooperative regimes according to the relationship between resource availability in the environment and population size. The most interesting regime represents moderate survival stress in which individuals coordinate in an evolutionary way to increase the probabilities of survival and reduce the risk of failing to meet the minimum needs for survival. Populations self-organise in an indirect reciprocity system in which the norm that emerges is to share the part of the resource that is not strictly necessary for survival, thereby collectively lowering the chances of starving. Our findings shed further light on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies.
... For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). GECCO commonly used to investigate the relationship resource availability, as a function of environmental stress, has on the emergence of cooperative-behaviour [1,2,6]. Additionally, ABM have also been used to study the emergence of social stratification [4,9,10]. ...
... RL algorithms are suitable for the problem of our study, as our model's governing agent searches for a sequence of decisions to maximize a reward, which in our model is the proportion of user agents that cooperate with the governing agent. Because of their relevance to problems involving repeated decision making, RL algorithms have been used in a variety of simulations of social systems [45][46][47] as well as social-ecological systems [42,48,49]. In a similar fashion, we used RL algorithms in our model. ...
One of the complexities of social systems is the emergence of behavior norms that are costly for individuals. Study of such complexities is of interest in diverse fields ranging from marketing to sustainability. In this study we built a conceptual Agent-Based Model to simulate interactions between a group of agents and a governing agent, where the governing agent encourages other agents to perform, in exchange for recognition, an action that is beneficial for the governing agent but costly for the individual agents. We equipped the governing agent with six Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning algorithms to find sequences of decisions that successfully encourage the group of agents to perform the desired action. Our results show that if the individual agents’ perceived cost of the action is low, then the desired action can become a trend in the society without the use of learning algorithms by the governing agent. If the perceived cost to individual agents is high, then the desired output may become rare in the space of all possible outcomes but can be found by appropriate algorithms. We found that Double Learning algorithms perform better than other algorithms we used. Through comparison with a baseline, we showed that our algorithms made a substantial difference in the rewards that can be obtained in the simulations.
... An obvious answer to this question is that humans are dependent on each other for their survival and well-being, which in turn implies that without either environmental or social pressure humans would not develop complex communities at all (see, e.g. [6] and references within). ...
Here we present an agent-based model where agents interact with other agents by playing a hybrid of dictator and ultimatum games in a co-evolving social network. The basic assumption about the behaviour of the agents in both games is that they try to attain superior socioeconomic positions relative to other agents. As the model parameters we have chosen the relative proportions of the dictator and ultimatum game strategies being played between a pair of agents in a single social transaction and a parameter depicting the living costs of the agents. The motivation of the study is to examine how different types of social interactions affect the formation of social structures and networks, when the agents have a tendency to maximise their socioeconomic standing. We find that such social networks of agents invariably undergo a community formation process from simple chain-like structure to more complex networks as the living cost parameter is increased. The point where this occurs, depends also on the relative proportion of the dictator and ultimatum games being played. We find that it is harder for complex social structures to form when the dictator game strategy in social transactions of agents becomes more dominant over that of the ultimatum game.
... The production and use of reservoirs on the Mesa Verde cuesta is an example of a group-level response to potential environmental volatility by constructing a local ecological niche that secures access to drinking water and irrigation for surrounding agricultural fields (Bryan, 1929;Crown, 1987;Stewart, 1940;Wilshusen et al., 1997), functioning as a type of cooperative storage and water management for multiple households (Angourakis et al., 2014;Ore and Bruins, 2012). Focusing on reservoirs as a main risk-aversion strategy to environmental volatility, however, assumes these water management features were physically accessible to all households across the cuesta, and ignores the likelihood that individual households were also implementing their own localized risk-aversion strategies-a common practice of households located within arid environments (Ashkenazi et al., 2012;Beckers et al., 2013;Bruins, 2012;Hunt and Gilbertson, 1998). ...
Prehistoric water management in the northern US Southwest was integral to successful subsistence. On the Mesa Verde cuesta in southwestern Colorado, several types of water management features have been identified in the archaeological record, but research into these features has typically focused on the efficacy of reservoirs—a large-scale, labor-intensive, and community-oriented means of collecting and storing water. This focus on large-scale water management features has largely ignored the productive potential of small-scale and low-cost strategies for water management executed by individual households. There is considerable evidence, for example, that extensive check dam networks were constructed and used on the Mesa Verde cuesta, but their actual utility as a small-scale risk-aversion strategy to resource stress has not systematically been explored. This paper identifies all ephemeral drainages on the Mesa Verde cuesta where check dam construction was possible, then applies a maize growing niche model to estimate total yields from check dam farming plots for each year from AD 890–1285. A demographic reconstruction is then used to estimate the percentage of the total cuesta population that could have been supported using only check dam maize yields through time. Results suggest that check dam farming could have supplied a reliable source of surplus annual maize sufficient for household storage needs even during the most populous time periods across the cuesta landscape.
... Agent-based modeling allows us to explore different social scenarios of varying complexity (Adami, Schossau, & Hintze, 2016;Premo, 2006;Rand & Nowak, 2013). Some authors have used it to investigate the importance of memory to promote cooperation (Hadzibeganovic, Lima, & Stauffer, 2014;Horva´th, Kova´rˇı´k, & Mengel, 2012;Mariano & Correia, 2014), and few have investigated cooperation based on reciprocity under ecological pressure (Angourakis, Santos, Gala´n, & Balbo, 2015;Pereda et al., 2017;Zibetti, Carrignon, & Bredeche, 2016). Combining the perspectives of evolutionary, cognitive, and psychological explanations of cooperation may lead to a deeper understanding of the proximate and adaptive mechanisms underlying cooperation (Prentice & Sheldon, 2015). ...
While cooperation maximizes collective welfare, selfishness maximizes short-term individual benefits. Why should any organism cooperate? Selfishness seems to be favored by natural selection. While this presents a classical dilemma in many fields, cooperation is observed at all levels of biological organization. By preserving the common good, cooperation may guarantee better survival chances for all. Evolution and maintenance of cooperation are possible by a combination of multiple mechanisms including reciprocity, which in primates and particularly in humans is largely dependent on memory and the ability to exchange social information, a function of language. In this article, we present a multi-agent model developed with the aim of evaluating the importance of memory in cognitive and social adaptations for cooperation based on reciprocity when populations are under ecological stress. We show that in a society under ecological pressure, the reciprocity network permitted by collaborative memory promotes cooperation.
... However, due to the intrinsic nature of Archaeology, which deals mainly with material remains, it is not straightforward to reconstruct the social domain and the food distribution patterns through them (Enloe, 2003). Consequently, several archaeological studies have focused on very specific examples such as the study of the development of trade and interchange systems (Dyke, 1999;Chapman, 2008) or the study of (communal) storage structures or technologies (see a review in (Angourakis et al., 2015)). ...
A well-known challenge in archaeological research is the exploration of the social mechanisms that hunter-gatherers may have implemented throughout history to deal with changes in resource availability. The agent-based model (ABM) ‘cooperation under resource pressure’ (CURP) was conceived to explore food stress episodes in societies lacking a food preservation technology. It was particularly aimed at understanding how cooperative behaviours in the form of food sharing practices emerge, increase and may become the prevailing strategy in relation to changes in resource availability and expectancy of reciprocity. CURP’s main outcome is the identification of three regimes of behaviour depending on the stress level. In this work, the model’s robustness to the original selection mechanism (random tournament) is assessed, as different dynamics can lead to different persistent regimes. For that purpose, three other selection mechanisms are implemented and evaluated, to identify the prevailing states of the system. Results show that the three regimes are robust irrespective of the analysed dynamics. We consequently examine in more detail the long-term archaeological implications that these results may have.
... An obvious answer to this question is that humans are dependent on each other for survival, which in turn implies that without either environmental or social pressure humans would not develop complex communities at all (see, e.g. [6] and references within). In order to model the societal effects of the tendency of superiority maximisation we introduced the better-than-hypothesis, or BTH, in [7]. ...
Here we present an agent based model involving a hybrid of dictator and ultimatum games being played in a co-evolving social network. The basic assumption about the behaviour of the agents is that they try to attain superior economic positions relative to other agents. As the model parameters we have chosen the relative proportions of the dictator and ultimatum game strategies being played between a pair of agents in a single social transaction and a parameter depicting the living costs of the agents. The motivation of the study is to examine how different types of social interactions affect the formation of social structures and communities, when the agents have the tendency to maximize their social standing. We find that such social networks of the agents invariably undergo a phase change from simple chain structure to more complex networks as the living cost parameter is increased. The point where this occurs, depends also on the relative proportion of the dictator and ultimatum games being played. We find that it is harder for complex social structures to form when the dictator game strategy in social transactions of agents becomes more dominant over that of the ultimatum game.
... At last, it should be highlighted that storage is a universal, multi- dimensional and multi-state phenomenon, which varies according to a wide range of internal and external factors, including economic, social, demographic, environmental and historical. Ethnographic research has demonstrated that there is a great deal of variation in the form, scale and function of food storage, depending on specific geographical, cul- tural and ecological settings ( Angourakis et al., 2015;Morgan, 2012: 715). Recognizing this variability provides a way of moving beyond binary oppositions such as foragers and collectors, immediate and de- layed-return systems, or egalitarian and non-egalitarian groups that may or may not exist ethnographically and archaeologically and, in- stead, allows us to assess the roles ecology, mobility, group size, and social distinctions played in the development of different storage be- haviors in pre-agricultural societies. ...
... Storage facilities often have higher archeological visibility than do past systems of land tenure and have been modeled as an evolutionary cooperation issue by Angourakis and colleagues. 25 Variability in the economics and cultural norms of storage can nevertheless account for much of the variability in its organization. For instance, archeologists working in Mesoamerica note that limitations on the transportation of staple goods such as food in an environment lacking pack animals resulted in underdeveloped storage infrastructure, 26 but may simultaneously have encouraged the development of markets as a system of distribution. ...
Archeologists investigating the emergence of large-scale societies in the past have renewed interest in examining the dynamics of cooperation as a means of understanding societal change and organizational variability within human groups over time. Unlike earlier approaches to these issues, which used models designated voluntaristic or managerial, contemporary research articulates more explicitly with frameworks for cooperation and collective action used in other fields, thereby facilitating empirical testing through better definition of the costs, benefits, and social mechanisms associated with success or failure in coordinated group action. Current scholarship is nevertheless bifurcated along lines of epistemology and scale, which is understandable but problematic for forging a broader, more transdisciplinary field of cooperation studies. Here, we point to some areas of potential overlap by reviewing archeological research that places the dynamics of social cooperation and competition in the foreground of the emergence of large-scale societies, which we define as those having larger populations, greater concentrations of political power, and higher degrees of social inequality. We focus on key issues involving the communal-resource management of subsistence and other economic goods, as well as the revenue flows that undergird political institutions. Drawing on archeological cases from across the globe, with greater detail from our area of expertise in Mesoamerica, we offer suggestions for strengthening analytical methods and generating more transdisciplinary research programs that address human societies across scalar and temporal spectra.
... Eventually, higher-level collectives become so well integrated that they can be treated as "individuals" in their own right (and can serve as lower-level units for the next evolutionary transition). Different authors have generated computer simulations to understand how hierarchical decision-making could have affected inter-group conflicts sometime through the historical evolution of human society (Mark 1998;Suleiman and Fischer 2000), the dynamics of status symbols in hierarchically ordered societies (Pedone and Conte 2001), the consequences of wealth distribution (Impullitti and Rebmann 2002), the coevolution of farming and private property (Bowles and Choi 2013;Bowles et al. 2010;Cockburn et al. 2013;Angourakis et al. 2015;Biscione et al. 2015;Gallagher et al. 2015), the deification of historical figures and the emergence of priesthoods (Dávid-Barrett and Carney 2015), the origins of war (Duering and Wahl 2014) and the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism (Levine and Modica 2013;Powers and Lehman 2015). Those models and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of property rights jointly emerged when they did, as an emergent property of the new possibilities of unambiguously demarcate and defend the new wealth produced and stored by farmers-crops, dwellings, and animals-. ...
This introductory essay aims to introduce the chapters in the book presenting some aspects of the theoretical and conceptual framework necessary to consider the advantages computer simulation techniques and technologies offer to historical disciplines, but also quoting from the hundreds of examples in current scientific literature to give a context within which the individual contributions can be understood better. We argue that historical simulations should be much more than vivid illustrations of what scholars believe in the present existed in the past. A simulation is basically the computer representation of a “mechanism”, representing how social intentions, goals and behaviors were causally connected in the past. This can be done by formulating a “generative model”, that is, a model of a set of mechanisms. In this chapter, it is suggested that computer simulation may act as a Virtual Laboratory to help studying how human societies have experimented relevant transformations and in which way the consequences of those transformations in technology, activities, behavior, organization or knowledge were transmitted to other social agents or groups of social agents. Building artificial societies inside a computer allows us to understand that social reality is not capricious. It has been produced somehow, although not always the same cause produces the same effect, because social actions are not performed in isolation, but in complex and dialectical frameworks, which favor, prevent, or modify the capacity, propensity, or tendency the action has to produce or to determine a concrete effect. This way of studying social dynamics in the past by means of computer simulations is beginning to abandon its infancy. Archaeologists and historians have started to convert social theories in computer programs trying to simulate social process and experiment with different explanations about known archaeological societies. Our book is just one additional example of a current trend among archaeologists and historians: historical events occurred only once and many years ago but within a computer surrogates of those events can be artificially repeated here and now for understanding how and why they happened.
The development, floruit and decline of the urban phase of the Indus Civilisation (c.2600/2500-1900 BC) provide an ideal opportunity to investigate social resilience and transformation in relation to a variable climate. The Indus Civilisation extended over most of the Indus River Basin, which includes a mix of diverse environments conditioned, among other factors, by partially overlapping patterns of winter and summer precipitation. These patterns likely changed towards the end of the urban phase (4.2 ka BP event), increasing aridity. The impact of this change appears to have varied at different cities and between urban and rural contexts. We present a simulation approach using agent-based modelling to address the potential diversity of agricultural strategies adopted by Indus settlements in different socio-ecological scenarios in Haryana, NW India. This is an ongoing initiative that consists of creating a modular model, Indus Village, that assesses the implications of trends in cropping strategies for the sustainability of settlements and the resilience of such strategies under different regimes of precipitation. The model aims to simulate rural settlements structured into farming households, with sub-models representing weather and land systems, food economy, demography, and land use. This model building is being carried out as part of the multi-disciplinary TwoRains project. It brings together research on material culture, settlement distribution, food production and consumption, vegetation and paleoenvironmental conditions.
This paper examines the use of archaeological proxies in the study of food surpluses in antiquity. Since foodstuffs rarely survive in the archaeological record, proxy evidence forms the foundation of our analyses. Scholars must be critical of these data to ensure that they provide the most accurate illustration of ancient trends possible. There are also questions that are rarely asked of proxy data, such as why the products for which they provide evidence were appealing and how they were consumed. To explore these issues, the export and consumption of wine from Roman Crete during the first–third century ad serves as a case study. This product is identified primarily through finds of ceramic containers known as amphorae. Proxy evidence, like amphorae, is indispensable, but scholars must ensure that they maximize the potential of these data while examining the role that food surplus played in social development.
To gain insights on long-term socio-ecological resilience, we examine adaptive responses of small-scale societies to dryland-related hazards in different regions and chronological periods, spanning from the mid-Holocene to the present. Based on evidence from Africa (Sahara and Sahel), Asia (South margin of the Thar desert) and Europe (South Spain), we discuss key traits and coping practices of small-scale societies that are potentially relevant for building resilience. The selected case studies illustrate four main coping mechanisms: mobility and migration, storage, commoning and collective action driven by religious beliefs. Ultimately, the study of resilience in the context of drylands emphasises the importance of adaptive traits and practices that are distinctive of small-scale societies: a strong socio-ecological coupling, a solid body of traditional ecological knowledge and a high degree of internal cohesion and self-organisation.
Humans are excellent but strategically contingent cooperators. How we cooperate and the boundaries of our cooperative relations are two of the most important organizing principles for social groups. Not surprisingly, the cultural and evolutionary dynamics of cooperation represent a fertile topic of research in social and behavioral sciences such as anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology (Axelrod 1997; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Boyd and Richerson 1992, 2009; Dovido et al. 2006; Fehr and Schmidt 1999; Gintis et al. 2005; Gurven 2006; Hammerstein 2003; Henrich and Henrich 2007; Marshall 2010; Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 2003; Patton 2009; Willer 2009). From a contemporary biological perspective, much of human uniqueness is said to rest in our abilities to cooperate at larger scales and in qualitatively different ways than all other animals, including nonhuman primates (Bingham 2000; Hill, Barton, and Hurtado 2009; Mitani 2009; Nowak 2006a, 2011; Sussman and Cloninger 2011; Tomasello 2009; Wilson, Timmel, and Miller 2004; cf. Kappeler and van Schaik 2006). Yet we can also be exceedingly competitive. These two sides of humanity are entwined, and may tragically converge in destructive forms of intergroup competition such as wars, which require high levels of intragroup cooperation and coordination. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. How, researchers ask, does cooperation evolve and thrive among individuals who strategically pursue self- or kin-interests despite all of the potential obstacles those interests present to group-oriented behaviors? What are the costs and benefits to individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum in participating in, or defecting from, cooperative endeavors? What suite of mechanisms for encouraging and maintaining cooperation exists within any particular society, and how does its composition evolve over time as a result of cumulative goal seeking by individuals and larger-scale environmental processes? Why does cooperation sometimes break down completely? Archaeologists have been investigating the developmental trajectories of cooperation and competition in past societies for decades, but have tended to emphasize the latter in seeking to explain those processes underlying cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation (or "selforganization") have been undertheorized in favor of political models stressing top-down leadership, often invoking compliance through coercion. In the meantime, evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions that are applicable to archaeology on multiple analytical scales, including reciprocal exchanges, monitoring the reputation of others, and the retribution or rewarding of transgression or compliance. This important axis of variability in the dynamics of past human societies has received scant attention in archaeological theory, with notable exceptions discussed later in this chapter. A focus on the interplay between cooperation and competition in past societies necessitates multiscalar approaches that consider the complete spectrum of human behavior, from the broad evolutionary processes instigated by aggregate individual actions, to the motivations for those actions at the level of households or individuals. Such approaches combine many of the strengths of existing theoretical paradigms in archaeology while offering productive means of reconciling entrenched divides between considerations of process and agency (compare Blanton and Fargher 2008; Boyd and Richerson 2008; Cowgill 2000; Feinman, Lightfoot, and Upham 2000; Flannery 1999; Pauketat 2001; Richerson and Boyd 1999; Shennan 2002; Spencer 1993). Contemporary models of cooperation are evolutionary, overlapping comfortably with traditional archaeological interests in elucidating the processes of diachronic social change. But they are also multiactor, envisioning all individuals as pursuing goals that can be simultaneously individualistic/competitive and collective/cooperative in a manner consistent with approaches that emphasize human agency and strategic action. In turn, the diachronic breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much-needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. Archaeological perspectives draw on a comparative record of long cultural evolutionary sequences (Marcus 2008), containing the physical correlates of past cooperation and competition, including the particular resources that were utilized through collective action and the symbols people manipulated to define themselves as cooperative or antagonistic. The contributions to this volume are not unified by a single paradigmatic approach to cooperation and collective action, yet the authors share the conviction that these issues should be foregrounded within contemporary archaeological discourse in order to better understand their dynamics in varied past and present contexts. Examples include non- or less coercive social mechanisms that operated in smaller-scale societies or in factions that primarily operated independently from the political institutions of larger ones, such as labor groups and social castes within early states and empires. Authors are interested in better defining the terms, appropriate units of analysis, and theoretical frameworks necessary for understanding group cooperation. We present diverse case studies with the aim of situating the diachronic and material foci of archaeology within the interdisciplinary dialogue on this issue of broad social concern. In this chapter I highlight some recent insights from research on cooperation across disciplines, use cross-cultural cases to suggest points of intersection with the archaeological record of cultural evolution, and outline the organization of the volume.
Using cemetery data, it has been possible to identify the signature of a previously unknown demographic process associated with the transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural economy. Characterized by a dramatic increase in the birth rate, and consequently of the population growth rate, over a period of less than a millennium following the transition to agriculture, this global demographic process has been termed the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT). The NDT signature has so far been detected in Europe, North America, Mesoamerica and South America. The methodological innovation which has made possible the identification of the NDT is the use of a relative chronology, fixed to the local onset of the Neolithic. That is, events are considered not in terms of their absolute calendar dates, but rather in terms of their relation to the local date of the transition to agriculture. This volume presents and discusses the consequences and implications of the NDT on a global scale. Topics include: The auses of the NDT at its onset; Indicators of economic intensification as related to the NDT; Settlement and village practices associated with the pace of the NDT; The emergence of social practices associated with larger population concentrations; The effects of increased population density on human health.
Preface
Food preservation is an action or a method of maintaining foods at a desired level of properties or nature
for their maximum benefits. In general, each step of handling, processing, storage, and distribution
affects the characteristics of food, which may be desirable or undesirable. Thus, understanding the effects
of each preservation method and handling procedure on foods is critical in food processing. The first edition
of this book was the first definitive source of information on food preservation. It was well received
by readers and became a bestseller and was also translated into Spanish by Acribia, Spain, in 2003.
Appreciation from scientists, academics, and industry professionals around the globe encouraged me to
produce an updated version. This edition has been developed by expanding the previous one with the
addition of new chapters and updating most of the chapters of the first edition. The 25 chapters in the
first edition are now expanded to 44 chapters.
The processing of food is no longer as simple or straightforward as in the past. It is now moving from
an art to a highly interdisciplinary science. A number of new preservation techniques are being developed
to satisfy current demands of economic preservation and consumer satisfaction in nutritional and sensory
aspects, convenience, absence of preservatives, low demand of energy, and environmental safety. Better
understanding and manipulation of these conventional and sophisticated preservation methods could help
to develop high-quality, safe products by better control of the processes and efficient selection of ingredients.
Food processing needs to use preservation techniques ranging from simple to sophisticated; thus, any
food process must acquire requisite knowledge about the methods, the technology, and the science of
mode of action. Keeping this in mind, this edition has been developed to discuss the fundamental and practical aspects of most of the food preservation methods important to practicing industrial and academic
food scientists, technologists, and engineers. Innovative technology in preservation is being developed in
the food industry that can extend shelf life; minimize risk; is environment friendly; or can improve functional,
sensory, and nutritional properties. The large and ever-increasing number of food products and new
preservation techniques available today creates a great demand for an up-to-date handbook of food preservation methods. This book emphasizes practical, cost-effective, and safe strategies for implementing
preservation techniques and dissects the exact mode or mechanisms involved in each preservation method
by highlighting the effect of preservation methods on food properties.
The first edition was divided into four parts. Part 1: Preservation of Fresh Food Products encompassed
the overview of food preservation and postharvest handling of foods. Part 2: Conventional Food
Preservation Methods presented comprehensive details on glass transition, water activity, drying, concentration, freezing, irradiation, modified atmosphere, hurdle technology, and the use of natural preservatives, antioxidants, pH, and nitrites. Part 3: Potential Food Preservation Methods detailed new and
innovative preservation techniques, such as pulsed electric fields, ohmic heating, high-pressure treatment,
edible coating, encapsulation, light, and sound. Part 4: Enhancing Food Preservation by Indirect
Approach described areas that indirectly help food preservation by improving quality and safety. These
areas are packaging and hazard analysis.
The second edition is divided into five parts. The grouping of Parts 2 and 3 in the first edition could
not be a clear approach since it was not easy to separate the conventional and the potential methods. In
the second edition, a better rational approach is used for grouping. The basis of grouping is the mode of
preservation method.
Part 1: Preservation of Fresh Food Products encompasses the overview of food preservation and postharvest
handling of foods, which includes physiology of fresh fruits and vegetables; handling and postharvest
treatments of fruits and vegetables; and postharvest handling of grains and pulses, fish and seafood, red
meat, milk; and also minimal processing of fruits and vegetables. This part can be read independently for
those who want a basic background in postharvest technology for foods of plant and animal origin. It also
gives valuable background information on the causes of food deterioration and classification of food preservation methods with the mode of their action.
Part 2: Preservation Using Chemicals and Microbes presents comprehensive preservation methods
based on additives of chemical or microbiological nature, including fermentation, antimicrobials, antioxidants, pH-lowering agents, and nitrides. Each chapter covers the mode of preservation actions and their applications in food products.
Part 3: Preservation by Controlling of Water, Structure, and Atmosphere details preservation methods
based on physical nature, including modified-atmosphere packaging; glass transition and state diagram;
membrane technology; stickiness and caking; drying, including osmotic dehydration; water activity; surface
treatment and edible coating; encapsulation and controlled release.
Part 4: Preservation Using Heat and Energy describes preservation methods based on thermal and
other forms of energy, including pasteurization, canning and sterilization, cooking and frying, freezing,
freezing–melting (or freeze concentration), microwave, ultrasound, ohmic heating, light, irradiation,
pulsed electric field, magnetic field, and high pressure. In addition, chapters on hurdle technology (or
combined methods) that uses a combination of preservation techniques are also included.
Part 5: Enhancing Food Preservation by Indirect Approach presents the approaches that indirectly help
food preservation by improving quality and safety. These techniques are packaging, hygienic design and
sanitation, hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP), good manufacturing practice (GMP), and
commercial considerations of managing profit and quality. Packaging is an integral part of food preservation
and it has very wide scope. In this edition, packaging techniques are presented in three chapters.
This second edition will be an invaluable resource for practicing and research food technologists, engineers,
and scientists, and a valuable text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in food,
agriculture/biological science, and engineering. Writing a book is an endless process, so the editor would
appreciate receiving new information and comments to assist in future compilations. I am confident that
this edition will prove to be interesting, informative, and enlightening to readers.
Communal granaries are a widespread and very significant feature of northwest Africa. Here the first systematic archaeobotanical study of such a granary is presented, with desiccated plant macro-remains retrieved from the pre-Hispanic site of El Álamo-Acusa, Gran Canaria, Spain (cal. ad 1000–1500). While modern contamination caused by animals was evident, most plant remains found there were ancient, including cereals, pulses, cultivated fruits and wild gathered plants. Hordeum vulgare ssp. vulgare and Ficus carica were the most common taxa, which appear to have been the two main staple foods for the pre-Hispanic population. The high frequencies of chaff and other plant residues indicate that crops were stored unprocessed. Most food plants had been eaten by insects and other animals, and only unpalatable parts were present. Remains of Sitophilus granarius (grain weevil) were common in the samples, suggesting problems of insect pests during long-term storage. In addition, we have identified leaves of cf. Laurus
novocanariensis, which may have been used as an insect repellent.
Investigations of the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and collective
action provide productive venues for theorizing social complexity, yet this multidisciplinary
scholarship contains analytical and epistemological tensions that require
reconciliation. We propose a course for integration of this diverse literature to
investigate the emergence and developmental trajectories of complex societies.
Greater attention to collective action problems, cultural mechanisms that promote
cooperation, differentiation of human interests, and multiscalar research designs
provide firmer conceptual underpinnings for a theoretically grounded cultural evolutionary
framework. The case of agricultural intensification in pre-Hispanic highland
Mexico is used to illustrate major points of the paper.
Keywords Cooperation . Collective action . Cultural evolution . Agricultural
intensification
The earliest postulated sedentary villages in Japan have been found in southern Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu Island. The Incipient Jomon period site of Sojiyama, dated to around 13,500 bp is thought to be a wintering site, while Kakoinohara, of similar date, is thought to have been occupied throughout the summer. The Earliest Jomon period site of Kakuriyama, Kaseda City dated to around 9800 cal. bp, is thought to have been occupied throughout the year. The village sites of Uenohara Section 4 (c. 12,800 bp) and Uenohara Section 3 (9500 to 8250–7400 bp) show further steps toward sedentism with more numerous house pits, greater quantities of highly decorated pottery and more substantial and durable site features.The early development of sedentism in south-western Japan is associated with a warming trend in which deciduous nut-bearing trees replaced a coniferous forest. This warming trend began first in south-western Japan and progressed to the north east. A second vegetational change (from 12,000 to 9000 cal. bp) brought a gradual increase in broadleaf evergreen forest with even more productive species of nut-bearing trees. Local archaeologists have postulated that there was some stress associated with the shift from the hunting of large Pleistocene mammals to small mammals and plant foods. The availability of nuts is thought to have enabled the growth of a storage economy which supported substantial villages and led to the production of decorated pottery, personal ornaments and ritual objects.In this paper I discuss the major sites and archaeological markers of sedentism, the chronological framework and main factors in the adoption of a sedentary way of life in southern Kyushu. I question whether the interpretation of increasing sedentism is as straightforward as it is presented. Actual 14C dates are recalibrated using the INTCAL curve. Estimated dates are based on recalibrated dates.
In one-shot social dilemma experiments, cooperation rates dramatically increase if subjects are allowed to communicate before making a choice. There are two possible explanations for this "communication effect". One is that communication enhances group identity, the other is that communication elicits social norms. I discuss both views and argue in favor of a norm-based explanation.
The Plateau region of the Pacific Northwest witnessed the emergence, persistence, and decline of a diverse array of hunter-gatherer communities during the course of a past several thousand year period. Consequently, the region contains an archaeological record of groups who lived at times in permanent villages, employed complex resource procurement and processing strategies, participated in wide-ranging trade networks, and maintained social organizations featuring high degrees of social inequality. Complex Hunter-Gatherers presents a broad synthesis of the archaeology of the Plateau, inclusive of the Columbia and Fraser-Thompson drainages. The contributors seek to further our understanding of the nature of prehistoric social organization, subsistence practices, and lifeways of those living on the Plateau, and to expand upon this foundation to understand the evolution and organization of complex hunter-gatherers in general.
In small-scale societies, ritual feasts are often an important setting for social integration and status competition. Material evidence of feasting and food storage may be preserved in community ceremonial precincts, such as platform mounds. To identify food-consumption activities, ceramic samples from mound and village contexts at the prehistoric Lubbub Creek site in Alabama are compared. There are no significant differences in the distribution of decorated types, ware categories, or vessel shapes. However, the mound has a more restricted range of vessel sizes and disproportionately larger vessels than the village sample. These results, together with supporting feature and faunal data, suggest that mound activities included large-group feasts and food storage.
This chapter discusses the aspects of hunter–gatherer complexity. The archeology of hunter–gatherers has generally relied on rather simplistic models to describe preagricultural adaptations. A misplaced reliance upon ethnographically known groups has precluded an appreciation of the diversity of hunting–gathering adaptations. Foragers in more temperate and fertile areas of the world were replaced by farmers long before written documents recorded their way of life. Hunter–gatherers surviving to the ethnographic present do so in the most marginal areas of the planet. Cultural complexity, in the context of hunter–gatherer adaptations, is the major concern of this volume. Although a variety of terms—developed, advanced, elaborate, sophisticated—have been employed to describe this phenomenon, they are semantically weighted with a teleological notion of progress. Each of the above contributions emphasizes certain characteristics of increasing complexity. Intensification has been discussed in terms of a variety of factors: environment, resource availability, subsistence, sedentism, linear settlement, technology, storage, population, exchange, conflict, competition, social organization, territoriality, style, labor organization, craft specialization, inequality, and status differentiation.
A cross-cultural survey of hunter-gatherers is conducted with particular emphasis on housing, mobility, and subsistence as these features vary with ecological settings and with particular environmental variables. Implications are drawn for investigations of variability as it is documented archaeologically. Particular emphasis is given to the features listed above, and to arguments in the literature that cite these variables and seek to evaluate the relative "complexity" of ancient sociocultural systems known from archaeological materials.
Despite the importance attributed to the study of storage behavior, little research has been conducted to determine whether it is even possible to distinguish storage areas from refuse areas. Archaeologists routinely separate storage pits from trash pits, but few have systematically investigated the defining characteristics of each. This study suggests that there is an archaeologically visible signature that can help researchers correctly interpret these loci. Research at occupied and recently abandoned camps among the now sedentary residents of Kutse in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana shows that refuse areas have a more homogeneous artifact inventory, regardless of the number of objects present. In contrast, non-trash activity areas at the same camps have a more heterogeneous, or diverse, inventory. The applicability and utility of this finding to the archaeological record is evaluated through the analysis of a Pueblo II Anasazi archaeological site from the southwestern United States. Patterns first recognized ethnoarchaeologically also appear to be recognizable in the archaeological record using the same methods. The results indicate that the statistical tests described here are applicable to distinguishing trash from other activity areas at archaeological sites.
We consider the daily practices of food preparation and consumption at the Neolithic Anatolian site of Çatalhöyük. We present the major food activities suggested from the archaeological evidence, including the timing and range of possible ingredients eaten by the residents of this thousand-year settlement. Plant, animal, and mineral resources, as well as the food production and preparation practices, are viewed in the context of the seasonal cycle. The food-related activities practiced at Çatalhöyük within each of the seasons are placed into five primary groups: production and procurement, processing, cooking, presentation, and eating. The daily household acts associated with these categories are discussed in detail. Using flora, fauna, micromorphological, lithic, ceramic, clay and architectural evidence, we present a picture of a community that was relatively healthy. The residents had a diet that relied heavily on plant foodstuffs, with wild plants remaining an important and valuable part of the daily and seasonal food practices throughout. The people of Çatalhöyük ate a range of animal products, including meat obtained from domesticated sheep/goats, wild cattle, small and large game, and to a more limited extent, eggs and waterfowl. Their social life can be seen through these foodways.
It is commonly supposed that hunters neither invest their labour in the expectation of a delayed return nor store their food to any significant extent. Though true of some, these suppositions are certainly not true of all. This article focuses on storage as one manifestation of delayed return in hunting societies. Three senses of storage are distinguished: ecological, practical and social. Ecological storage, an interruption in the flow of nutrients from animals and plants to human consumers, is related to waste, the deflection of this flow. The practical activity of setting aside harvested produce is seen as a response to the temporal scheduling of resource extraction, transport, preparation and consumption. Social storage, by contrast, refers to the convergence of rights to specific resource upon a single interest, and is an aspect of the rationality of resource conservation. The practical storage involved in time budgeting does not necessarily entail social storage, which limplies the perception of scarcity of resources regarded as property or wealth. The deferment of access to resources conceived in this social sense cannot be deduced from delays in the practical processes of production. Appropriative labour is specific to agricultural and pastoral production, as opposed to purely extractive hunting and gathering; therefore 'delayed returns' have a social significance in the former which is lacking in the latter. Yet in peoples' conceptual categories this opposition may be confounded, yielding perhaps what amounts to an ideological transformation from hunting to farming.
In small-scale societies, ritual feasts are often an important setting for social integration and status competition. Material evidence of feasting and food storage may be preserved in community ceremonial precincts, such as platform mounds. To identify food-consumption activities, ceramic samples from mound and village contexts at the prehistoric Lubbub Creek site in Alabama are compared. There are no significant differences in the distribution of decorated types, ware categories, or vessel shapes. However, the mound has a more restricted range of vessel sizes and disproportionately larger vessels than the village sample. These results, together with supporting feature and faunal data, suggest that mound activities included large-group feasts and food storage.
In Mesoamerica and the Near East, the emergence of the village seems to have involved two stages. In the first stage, individuals were distributed through a series of small circular-to-oval structures, accompanied by communal or "shared" storage features. In the second stage, nuclear families occupied substantial rectangular houses with private storage rooms. Over the last 30 years a wealth of data from the Near East, Egypt, the Trans-Caucasus, India, Africa, and the Southwest U.S. have enriched our understanding of this phenomenon. And in Mesoamerica and the Near East, evidence suggests that nuclear family households eventually gave way to a third stage, one featuring extended family households whose greater labor force made possible extensive multifaceted economies. /// En Mesoamérica y el Cercano Oriente, la evolución de las primeras aldeas parece haber pasado por dos etapas. En la primera etapa, los miembros del grupo ocupaban una serie de pequeños abrigos circulares u ovalados, y mantenían depósitos comunales para el uso de todos. En la segunda etapa, familias nucleares vivían en casas rectangulares con cuartos de depósito privados. Durante los últimos 30 años, datos del Cercano Oriente, Egipto, India, Africa, el Suroeste de los E.E.U.U. y la región Trans-Caucásica han amplificado el conocimiento de tales cambios residenciales. Además, en Mesoamérica y el Cercano Oriente, se ha notado una tercera etapa: casas para familias nucleares fueron reemplazadas por residencias más grandes, en las cuales una familia extendida de 15-20 personas proporcionó mano de obra para una economía compleja.
This paper presents a Levantine model for the origins of cultivation of various wild plants as motivated by the vagaries of the climatic fluctuation of the Younger Dryas within the context of the mosaic ecology of the region that affected communities that were already sedentary or semisedentary. In addition to holding to their territories, these communities found ways to intensify their food procurement strategy by adopting intentional growth of previously known annuals, such as a variety of cereals. The Levantine sequence, where Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene Neolithic archaeology is well known, is employed as a model for speculating on the origins of millet cultivation in northern China, where both the archaeological data and the dates are yet insufficient to document the evolution of socioeconomic changes that resulted in the establishment of an agricultural system.
Individuals will be selected to fight only for a fitness gain. If food is found in large packages, some of the package falls high on a diminishing returns curve of the fitness value of the food to the finder. It will not pay the finder to defend such portions against a hungry latecomer. If food is found on different occasions by different individuals, then theft is likely to be tolerated repeatedly. This would give the high frequency of “reciprocation” and “good reciprocators” needed for reciprocal altruism to evolve.
This paper examines specific cultivation, preservation and storage techniques for some selected staple crops in the food farming community of Ayirebi, near Akyem Oda, in southeastern Ghana. The traditional subsistence methods of Ayirebi farming households are well adapted to the social and geographical environments of the region. The long‐term future of developing African communities may well lie in building up thriving rural communities producing the food needed by the wider population. However, before this can be achieved, the particular food cultivation strategies of local communities need to be understood. Micro level studies such as this one will provide specific data vital to formulating and implementing a general agenda for national agricultural and economic development.
Understanding of European prehistoric storage practices tends to focus on the long-term and large-scale storage of cereals from the Neolithic onwards. In addition, storage is often associated with the development of sedentism and social complexity. Through the use of anthropological and ethnographic data this paper demonstrates that storage by both hunter–gatherers and farmers is more complex. New storage categories, such as closed and open caches, and portable storage, are suggested as ways of understanding whether similar storage practices were used during European prehistory. We learn that although direct evidence for storage is difficult to find in the archaeological record, a combination of ethnographic data and indirect evidence demonstrates that storage, especially this use of small-scale storage, was practiced in prehistory. In the conclusion, this paper demonstrates that storage during the Mesolithic (11,300–6000 BP) would have played a vital role in the lifeways of hunter–gatherers and that for the Neolithic (6000–4500 BP) the use of small-scale storage of a variety of foods would have been equally important as the storage of grain.
This paper seeks to investigate the relative subsistence potential of Late Minoan I households in Crete on the basis of the archaeological evidence. It aspires to develop a methodological framework for the examination of the subsistence economy based on storage containers (pithoi) and installations recovered in seventy houses.By identifying different storage strategies and converting capacity estimates into calorific values we infer differences in households’ subsistence potential. Ordinary households had low subsistence potential and only a few of the elite households had a markedly higher subsistence potential. While this ensured for these elite households high self‐sufficiency and participation in conspicuous consumption, it could not have served in alleviating the community's food shortages, should these have occurred. The emerging Late Minoan IB picture attests to the highly centralized and hierarchical organization of the subsistence economy, in keeping with the centralizing trend manifested from Middle Minoan III onwards.
The theoretical approach to agricultural origins in the last decade has concentrated on techno‐environmental and demographic causality. This paper attempts to show that both are dependent upon the social structure, and that this is where the enquiry should begin. The social properties of a tribal system are examined; first, in an anthropological framework using ethnographic illustrations, and then in an archaeological framework using prehistoric data. The ability of such systems to generate increasing demands on production, which under certain conditions may be resolved by a commitment to agriculture, is stressed.
Natural selection is potentially a hierarchical process that can produce adaptive groups in addition to adaptive individuals. The possibility of group selection was largely rejected in the 1960s and replaced with a number of theoretical frameworks that appear to rely exclusively on self-interest. More recently, it has emerged that these frameworks merely view the process of multi level selection from different perspectives and do not constitute arguments against group selection. The confusion between process and perspective is illustrated with a detailed case study from the anthropological literature. Food is often shared in hunter-gatherer societies, which appears to benefit the group at the expense of the individual provider. The tolerated-their model attempts to explain food acquisition and sharing as a form of self-interest. I show that the tolerated-theft model is virtually identical to one of the first group-selection models and that the appearance of self-interest is based on the redefinition of terms. I then show how additional insight can be gained by modeling the evolution of hunting and sharing as a multilevel selection process. This detailed case study is intended to contribute to a legitimate scientific pluralism and to a general reassessment of human social groups as adaptive units.
The storage of foodstuffs is generally considered to be a precondition of horticulture and sedentism. Possible forms of storage facilities documented either in the ethnohistoric records for the Northeast or suggested in the archaeological literature are described and discussed. Alternative functional interpretations are also considered but, in all cases, the role for use as storage facilities is argued to be at least as convincing as the alternative functions. Possible uses of this data in more broadly based applications are also considered.
Some hunter-gatherer societies (the Indians of California and of the NW Coast, for instance) depart significantly from the commonly accepted definition. This paper demonstrates that in such societies the economic structure is based on seasonal and intensive storage of major food resources. The societies presenting this type of economic structure are 1) sedentary, 2) high-density, and 3) prone to socioeconomic inequality. These three characteristics set California and NW Coast Indian societies well apart from the small, nomadic and egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies traditionally considered typical and challenge the hypothesis that the adoption of agriculture represents in itself a major milestone in the social history of humanity. The three features are found in both agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies in which resources are systematically accumulated. Thus it seems that the adoption of agriculture is less significant for social evolution than the emergence of an economic structure based on food storage.-Author
The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required-secure individual claims to the products of one's labor-were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers-crops, dwellings, and animals-could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.
Trust and Reciprocityis the sixth book in the Russell Sage Foundation's series on trust. This collection of essays differs from the other books in the series in two fundamental ways. First, every chapter of this book draws heavily on the results of behavioral experiments to explain how trust (and reciprocity) develop and a few of the chapters present important new experimental results. A second theme, and the second way that this book differs from others, is that the research described in this volume is truly interdisciplinary and therefore provides valuable perspectives not learned in the graduate economics curriculum. While many of the contributors are economists (Eckel, Harbaugh, Krause, McCabe, Schmidt, Smith, Vesterlund, and Walker), just as many are political scientists (Ahn, Hanley, Hardin, Levi, Morikawa, Orbell, Ostrom, and Wilson), and important contributions come from psy- chologists (Kurzban and Yamagishi) and sociologists (Cook and Cooper). For that matter, one of the most interesting chapters is written by an animal behaviorist (de Waal). This book is an invaluable review of behavioral research conducted on trust and reci- procity. It is clear that this book will soon find its way onto the shelves of the most active behavioral researchers, as well as, into the backpacks of many students who are interested in prosocial behavior. Following (Arrow, 1974), the book identifies the problem of trust as one of the fundamental issues in the social sciences. Trust seems paradoxical to economists who know the behavioral literature. Time and again, experimental participants achieve Pareto superior outcomes while researchers scratch their heads and ask why homo economicus would trust others enough to take actions that lead to better outcomes for all when he must make himself vulnerable to exploitation in the process? And, moreover, why is he usually not disappointed in the trustworthiness of his counterparts? Granted, identifying the fact that behavior does not match the predictions of standard game theoretic models is old news. Thankfully, the contributors to this volume spend little time rehashing this point. Instead, their work is focused on moving past the straw man built on asocial preferences to examine the determinants of this prosocial behavior. The book is organized into five broad sections. Part 1 introduces social dilemmas and the issues important to trust and reciprocity research. Part 2 provides the evolutionary rationale for trusting behavior. Part 3 examines the cognitive factors that provide foundations for the behavior we see in the lab. Part 4 presents a few new experiments and provides a review of the existing experimental literature on trust. Concluding thoughts are expressed in Part 5. Part 1 begins with the introductory essay (Chapter 1) by Elinor Ostrom and James Walker. Here the authors hit the mark by stating that, now that the amazement with the fact that the
Examines the types of food that is stored; caching behaviour (including seasonality, and the evolution of body structures which help to transport quantities of food); the defence of stored food from microbes and from interspecific competitors; social organisation and food caching; the significance of memory; optimal foraging in filling caches; the sequence of cache usage; and evolutionary feedback from stored food (ie some cached item are 'lost' in terms of reproduction, but some stored diaspores are probably more represented in future generations than other diaspores of the same species).-P.J.Jarvis