ABSTRACT
One aspect of all interesting social systems would seem to be the need to synchronize reliably sets of concurrent or parallel social processes. While many observers will readily admit to the existence of mechanisms to meet this need, few have attempted to model them. The widespread bias toward the modeling of human ecosystems in terms of matter and energy reflects a corresponding bias in the nature of the available data. That is, aspects of a prehistoric society’s material culture, such as tools, animal bones, and plant remains, are more likely to be preserved in the archaeological record than evidence concerning its information-processing and decision-making structure. Incipient agriculture, Flannery suggested, began as an extension of efforts to increase the local density of desirable plants.
