Modeling the emergence and resilience of complex socioeconomic systems in the Maya lowlands

Highly integrated socioeconomic and political systems marked by administrative hierarchies and rulers developed in multiple locations around the world during the last 8000 years. The process was episodic and marked by frequent economic failure and political disintegration, in some instances in the context of abrupt climate change. In this talk I will provide a preliminary overview of a new collaborative project funded by the human social dynamics program at NSF to model human behavioral responses to environmental transformation, abrupt or gradual, linking these processes to patterns of settlement, resource exploitation, agricultural intensification, competition, and polity stability. The theoretical framework for this project is drawn from behavioral ecology and the goal is to integrate key variables such as population density and distribution, environmental suitability as a function of economic intensification and endogenous environmental change, and political exploitation. A secondary goal of the project is apply and test the model at Uxbenk·, a Maya polity that formed in southern Belize between 4000-1500 year ago. Archaeological work in the region suggests that increasingly integrated socioeconomic systems formed in the context of demographic expansion, political fissioning, agricultural intensification, and environmental degradation. I will provide an overview of the strategic paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and ethnographic work in southern Belize that will guide our statistical evaluation of functional relationships, choice of model parameters, and help test model outcomes.

    Suggested Readings:

Kennett, D. J. and B. Winterhalder 2008, Demographic expansion, despotism, and the colonisation of East and South Polynesia. In Islands of Inquiry: Colonisation, seafaring and the archaeology of maritime landscapes (Terra Australis 29), edited by G. Clark, F. Leach and S. O'Connor, pp. 87-96. Australia National University Press, Canberra.

Kennett, D. J., B. Winterhalder, J. Bartruff, and J. M. Erlandson, 2009, An Ecological Model for the Emergence of Institutionalized Social Hierarchies on California’s Northern Channel Islands. In Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution, edited by S. Shennan, pp. 297-314. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Lee, C and S. Tuljapurkar 2008. Population and prehistory I: Food-dependent population growth in constant environments. Theoretical Population Biology 73: 473-482.