One clear trend that can be discerned in the last 15 years of otherwise-rather-protean Southwestern archaeology is a growing recognition that at any given time, demographic productive, and organizational strategies can be quite variable, even within comparatively small regions; that these...

The object of the workshop was to discuss and demonstrate the modeling of artificial societies and to suggest its potential for extending our knowledge about the prehistoric Southwest. Our efforts are part of the much larger questions anthropologists have asked for generations concerning how...

Reciprocity is an ancient and important social practice that evolved in very small-scale societies. In this paper we present an abstract model of the way systems work that are organized through balanced reciprocity (Sahlins 1972:185-275). This model will help us understand the general nature of...

The collapse of ancient societies such as the Mesa Verde-region pre-Hispanic Pueblos has puzzled generations of scientists. Many explanations for particular cases have been suggested, from combinations of social, political and economic factors (Tainter 1988), to climatic factors such as drought....

Recent developments in the study of the pehistory of the northern Mogollon and Anasazi areas of the North American Southwest are reviewed, with emphasis on the pre-A.D. 1150 period, in an attempt to identify key empirical results and incipient interpretive directions.

Since the classic work of Feyerabend and Kuhn, the role of social factors in the scientific enterprise has been a major concern in the philosophy and history of science. In particular, the presence of social factors such as the desire for prestige or pressures to conform to accepted ideas, have...

Inefficient delays in trades can sometimes be observed after the arrival of important public news. This paper explains these phenomena with a model in which agents defer trades in the fear that they may be taken advantaged of by better informed trading partners. Under certain conditions, delay...

In the framework of the median voter theorem, an ideologically driven candidate can fully alter policy when running against a vote-maximizing oponent. When turnout is allowed to depend on the relative positioning of the ideal points of the candidates relative to the voter, this result need not...

General equilibrium theory in economics defines the relative prices for goods and services, but does not fix the absolute values of prices. We present a theory of money in which the value of money is a time dependent "strategic variable," to be chosen by the individual agents. The idea is...

This paper reviews the evolution of trading structures by examining two pertinent strands in the literature on economics with interacting agents, one, works that presume a specified topology of interactions among agents, and two, works that let random mechanisms determine that topology. The papr...