Abstract
Archaeological anthropologists increasingly face, in all our endeavors, the problem of expressing and evaluating our ideas about cultural phenomena, in which participants deal with many impacts from parallel and higher-order entities through the recursive—that is, self-redefining—mechanisms that culture allows. New formal models involving “cultural algorithms” (Reynolds, 1994) provide promising approaches to such problems. Kent Flannery’s magisterial study of early foragers at the cave of Guild Naquitz in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico (Flannery, 1986) serves as an inspiration to those seeking to advance theoretical formulations about complex productive and social arrangements.
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Wright, H.T. (2000). Modeling Tributary Economies and Hierarchical Polities. In: Feinman, G.M., Manzanilla, L. (eds) Cultural Evolution. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4173-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4173-8_8
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