ABSTRACT
This chapter considers that nearly all agricultural production among the northern Anasazi was at the household level. It begins with a context to predict when networks of food exchange among households ought to appear, based solely on the self-interest of the households involved. In assessing the performance of the risk-sensitivity model, it is important to remember that the household-level decisions that it predicts are being made on the basis of perceived per household values. The chapter argues that networks of food sharing provide a foundation for more general elaboration of sociopolitical complexity in cases where production provides a surplus. Food sharing is not only one of the most fundamental forms of human cooperation but is symbolically implicated in more elaborate cooperative endeavors and may form the foundation for their elaboration. The chapter discusses how “pooling behavior” might be recognized in the archaeological record.
