ABSTRACT
A great deal of research has been devoted to understanding and explaining the pithouse-to-pueblo transition and similar processes in other parts of the world. This chapter attempts to understand human social responses to resource stress and economic uncertainty among food producers in the Southwest. It explores whether some component of food production and the pattern of yields might explain the relatively inegalitarian relations observed in food-producing societies. T. A. Kohler and Carla R. Van West argue that cooperation such as food sharing will be most valuable in circumstances of high production coupled with high temporal and spatial variability. The data on the annual yield per household are used to examine different strategies of sharing and distribution, specifically strategies of household independence, pooling, and restricted sharing. In contrast, social storage “does represent the direct negation of sharing,” and often involves private or individual storage of good.
