Practical and prestige technologies: The evolution of material systems

Design theory provides a useful means for analyzing both practical and prestige technologies, although the goals and constraints of each are very different. The aggrandizer model of prestige technology postulates that prestige items were essential elements in aggrandizer strategies and that prestige items emerged only under conditions of sustainable food surpluses and included the most important innovations of the last 30,000 years such as metal working, pottery, sophisticated art, and domesticated plants and animals. The aggrandizer model also accounts for the transformation of some prestige technologies into practical technologies.     

Housing Price Gradients: The Intersection of Space and Built Form

A hedonic housing price model, implemented for the Dallas region, reveals a housing market structured around multiple nodes, some of which give rise to positive and others to negative externalities. The utility/disutility derived from relative location is capitalized into the size and quality of the housing stock and the nature of neighborhood amenities. The result is a convergence of space and built form.     

A Factorial Model of Aggregate Spatio-Temporal Behavior: Application to the Diurnal Cycle

The cross-sectional nature of much social data, coupled with the static view provided by maps and current spatial data handling software, have produced a tradition of research on urban spatial structure that is largely two-dimensional and derived from residential locations. The paper presents an analysis of a space-time diary data set collected in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A series of transformations are used to convert the individual diary records to a three-mode matrix of intensities, which is then analyzed using the PARAFAC three-mode factor model. Home/work is found to be the strongest organizing dimension of the urban space-time, followed by entertainment, shopping, and education / work. We show how these dimensions appear to varying degrees in different locations, time periods, and human activities. The paper argues for a dynamic view of urban spatial structure in which only the physical facilities remain static.     

The corporate group as an archaeological unit

Although corporate groups have featured in the anthropological literature for a century, and have more recently been proposed as a potentially useful unit for archaeological analysis (L. Freeman, 1968, In Man the hunter, edited by R. Lee and I. De Vore, pp. 262–267. Aldine, Chicago), application of the concept in archaeology has largely remained hypothetical, and little theoretical modeling has been attempted. In spite of this neglect, it is argued here that the corporate group is potentially one of the most useful and important aspects of the archaeological record that can be dealt with. This conclusion is derived from a detailed ethnoar-chaeological analysis of over 150 households in the Maya Highlands, in which it became apparent that social, economic, and demographic characteristics of households were only loosely associated with a wide variety of material culture expressions. In contrast, such inferences seemed to be much more reliable when households were grouped into “hypothetical corporate groups” and group averages were compared. In addition, theoretical considerations based on economics and on interactions also indicate that the analysis of corporate groups shold be more rewarding and potentially more accurate than the analysis of individual households. Archaeologically, corporate groups can be defined where residential coherency and internal hierarchies are demonstrable. Because corporate groups can be viewed as signaling major changes in the structuring of society, and in the evolution of social and political complexity, the investigation of conditions under which corporate groups emerge should be of major theoretical significance to the entire discipline of archaeology. Moreover, because of the close logical links to material culture and the environment, theoretical modeling should be particularly amenable to archaeological testing. In sum, corporate groups provide an unusually fertile problem area which archaeologists can hope to attack with at least a promising degree of success.