ERC Advanced Grant · 2020
Reverse engineering collective action: complex technologies in stateless societies
Cooperation is a markedly human mix of innate and learned behaviour, and a key to tackling some of our greatest concerns. Paradoxically, studies of social dynamics often focus on hierarchies, state formation and structures ruled by coercive power, with comparatively little regard to the mechanisms whereby humans voluntarily collaborate. Encouragingly, new research on collective action is reconciling classic anthropology and game theory and empirical studies of group resource management, thus heralding a fundamental transformation. Archaeological collective action studies have mostly concentrated on feasts, subsistence and relatively simple technologies. There is a perplexing lack of…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.