Wealth inequality in the prehispanic northern US Southwest: from Malthus to Tyche

Persistent differences in wealth and power among prehispanic Pueblo societies are visible from the late AD 800s through the late 1200s, after which large portions of the northern US Southwest were depopulated. In this paper we measure these differences in wealth using Gini coefficients based on house size, and show that high Ginis (large wealth differences) are positively related to persistence in settlements and inversely related to an annual measure of the size of the unoccupied dry-farming niche. We argue that wealth inequality in this record is due first to processes inherent in village life which have internally different distributions of the most productive maize fields, exacerbated by the dynamics of systems of balanced reciprocity; and second to decreasing ability to escape village life owing to shrinking availability of unoccupied places within the maize dry-farming niche as villages get enmeshed in regional systems of tribute or taxation. We embed this analytical reconstruction in the model of an ‘Abrupt imposition of Malthusian equilibrium in a natural-fertility, agrarian society’ proposed by Puleston et al. (Puleston C, Tuljapurkar S, Winterhalder B. 2014 PLoS ONE 9, e87541 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0087541)), but show that the transition to Malthusian dynamics in this area is not abrupt but extends over centuriesThis article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’

The Effects of Generalized Reciprocal Exchange on the Resilience of Social Networks: An Example from the Prehispanic Mesa Verde Region

The initial version of the model used in this study, Village 1.0, was implemented by Tim Kohler and a team of developers mostly from Washington State University. The original model addressed environmental constraints only and did not attempt to model social interaction. In a recent paper we employed Cultural Algorithms as a framework in which to add selected social considerations. In this paper we extend our previous model by adding the ability of agents to perform symmetrically initiated or asymmetrically initiated generalized reciprocal exchange. We have developed a state model for agents' knowledge and, given agents' different responses based on this knowledge. Experiments have shown that the network structure of the systems without reciprocity was the simplest but least resilient. As we allowed agents more opportunities to exchange resources we produced more complex network structures, larger populations, and more resilient systems. Furthermore, allowing the agents to buffer their requests by using a finite state model improved the relative resilience of these larger systems. Introducing reciprocity that can be triggered by both requestors and donors produced the largest number of successful donations. This represents the synergy produced by using the information from two complementary situations within the network. Thus, the network has more information with which it can work and tended to be more resilient than otherwise.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44742/1/10588_2004_Article_5270975.pd

Anasazi Communities at Dolores: Early Small Settlements in the Dolores River Canyon and Western Sagehen Flats Area

This volume reports on a series of investigations in the Dolores River canyon and the western Sagehen Flats area of the Dolores Project. Included in the collection are an overview of the Grass Mesa Locality (with summary of Dolores Archaeological Program systematics), the results of the 1979-1980 Grass Mesa Locality Testing Program, and 6 site reports that describe excavations undertaken between 1979 and 1983. The excavated sites reported include: (1) LeMoc Shelter (5MT2151), which exposed 5 Anasazi occupations between A.D. 750 and 950; (2) Prince Hamlet (5MT2161), a Pueblo I habitation occupied between A.D. 720-840; (3) Hamlet de la Ofla (5MT2181), with a primary occupation between A.D. 780 and 810 and a later field house manifestation; (4) Kin Hush (5MT2336), with multiple occupations assigned to the A.D. 760-850, A.D. 850-975, and A.D. 1050-1200 periods; (5) Pozo Hamlet (5MT4613), a pithouse and associated features with construction traits of both Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods between A.D. 600 and 780; and (6) Poco Tiempo (5MT2378), a Basketmaker III site dating between A.D. 690 and 730

Reply to Bhowmik et al.: Democratic climate action and studying extreme climate risks are not in tension

[no abstract available

Reply to Ruhl and Craig: Assessing and governing extreme climate risks needs to be legitimate and democratic

[No abstract available

Relationship between Thermodynamic Driving Force and One-Way Fluxes in Reversible Chemical Reactions

Chemical reaction systems operating in nonequilibrium open-system states arise in a great number of contexts, including the study of living organisms, in which chemical reactions, in general, are far from equilibrium. Here we introduce a theorem that relates forward and re-verse fluxes and free energy for any chemical process operating in a steady state. This rela-tionship, which is a generalization of equilibrium conditions to the case of a chemical process occurring in a nonequilibrium steady state, provides a novel equivalent definition for chemical reaction free energy. In addition, it is shown that previously unrelated theories introduced by Ussing and Hodgkin and Huxley for transport of ions across membranes, Hill for catalytic cycle fluxes, and Crooks for entropy production in microscopically reversible systems, are united in a common framework based on this relationship.Comment: 11 page