"Increasingly, economists have acknowledged that a major limitation to economic theory has been its failure to incorporate human values and beliefs as motivational factors. Conversely, the economic underpinnings of ritual practice are under-theorized and therefore not accessible to economists working on synthetic theories of human choice. This book addresses the problem by bringing together anthropologists with diverse backgrounds in the ..."
Questioning Collapse(1st Edition) Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire by Patricia Ann Mcanany, Norman Yoffee Paperback, 392 Pages, Published 2009 by Cambridge University Press ISBN-13: 978-0-521-73366-3, ISBN: 0-521-73366-9
"Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation ..."
"“A must-have for anyone interested in the role of ancestors in past and present societies.”—Mercourios Georgiadis, author of Kos in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age: The Halasarna Finds and the Aegean Settlement Pattern “Ancestor veneration and manipulation are of great importance to our understanding of societies past and present. This volume will become a standard reference work for academics and students alike.”—Nicola Harrington ..."
"units, or territories, in the larger polity (see de Montmollin, 1988; Wells, 2000). For
example, in the 1980s, Olivier de Montmollin (1988) built on previous analyses of
plaza–hinterland relationships in Mesoamerica to propose that the concept of a
political microcosm explained the physical configuration of the Late Classic Maya
center of Tenam Rosario in Chiapas, Mexico. The capital was comprised of ten
contiguous plazas, with a s ..."