Joseph A Tainter
Biographic Data
| ID | 74934 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph A Tainter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph A |
| FAMILY NAME | Tainter |
| SIGNATURE | TAINTER J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utah State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 246 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Energy Gain and the Evolution of Organization
The evolution of complexity is one of the long-standing concerns of historical science, as well as being crucial to understanding the modern world and our future. This chapter explores the connection of complexity to energy gain, energy return on investment, and the energy–complexity spiral. The connection of energy gain to complexity is illustrated by case studies of fungus-farming ants and the Roman Empire. A comprehensive set of propositions e…
Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest
Introduction: Prehistoric Societies as Evolving Complex Systems Joseph A. Tainter * Demography, Environment, and Subsistence Stress Jeffrey S. Dean * Notes on Economic Uncertainty and Human Behavior in the Prehistoric North American Southwest Paul E. Minnis * Hunting, Gathering, and Health in the Prehistoric Southwest Katherine A. Spielmann and Eric A. Angstadt-Leto * Technological Strategies Responsive to Subsistence Stress Margaret C. Nelson * …
Evolving Complexity and Environmental Risk in the Prehistoric Southwest
Modelling the mysterious Maya
The Nexus of Population, Energy, Innovation, and Complexity
For the past 200 years, humans have benefited from the abundant, inexpensive, and easily obtained energy of fossil fuels. Energy surpluses such as this are unusual in human history. In systems with little surplus energy, population growth is low and complexity emerges slowly due to the energetic costs it carries. On the rare occasions when energy is readily available, societies respond by growing rapidly. They must become more complex in response…
Sustainability
Research needs in sustainability encompass a range of topics spanning much of social and behavioral science. Sustainability requires understanding human cognition, capacity to reason and make decisions, capacity for long‐term planning, understanding trade‐offs, risk perceptions, communication techniques, innovation, the consequences of improvements in efficiency, energy and other resources, complexity in problem solving, and other matters. We dis…
Tropical Landscapes and the Ancient Maya
Archaeologists have begun to understand that many of the challenges facing our technologically sophisticated, resource dependent, urban systems were also destabilizing factors in ancient complex societies. The focus of IHOPE-Maya is to identify how humans living in the tropical Maya Lowlands in present-day Central America responded to and impacted their environments over the past three millennia, and to relate knowledge of those processes to mode…
Collapse and Sustainability
The factors that make a society sustainable, or vulnerable to collapse, can rarely be discerned within a human lifetime. Sustainability challenges develop over periods of decades, generations, or centuries. Sustainability must therefore be a historical science. A major challenge of the IHOPE program is how to draw valid comparisons among different kinds of societies, existing at different times, that can clarify our contemporary problems of susta…
L'Effondrement des Societes Complexes
Energy, complexity, and sustainability
Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History
Book Review| January 01 2008 Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History. Bradley J. Parker and Lars Rodseth. Joseph A. Tainter Joseph A. Tainter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2008) 82 (1): 137–138. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-82.1.137 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J…
Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment
Collapse is a perennial topic among historical scholars, and a favorite source of lessons for our future. Collapse literature often reflects contemporary fears and aspirations. The four books discussed here mirror today's concern with anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change, and for better or worse, influence a reading public far beyond the academy. Two books focus on an individual collapse—the Classic Maya—and two aspire to a …
The Recurring Dark Ages
Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse
The literature on sustainability and the human future emphasizes the belief that population and/or mass consumption caused resource degradation and collapse in earlier societies. Archaeological literature proposing overshoot and collapse appears in current debates over resource conservation versus continued economic growth. The prominence of this debate, with its national and international dimensions, makes it important to assess whether there is…
Resource Transitions and Energy Gain
"Energy gain constrains resource use, social organization, and landscape organization in human and other living systems. Changes in energy gain have common characteristics across living systems. We describe these commonalities in selected case studies involving imperial taxation, fungus-farming ants, and North American beaver, and propose a suite of hypotheses for the organization of systems that subsist on different levels of energy gain. Organi…
Problem Solving
The way the wind blows
List of IllustrationsList of TablesNotes on the Contributors1. Climate, History, and Human Action, by Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan Keech Mc Intosh1. Climate, Environment, and Human Action2. Climate Variability During the Holocene: An Update, by Robert B. Dunbar3. Complexity Theory and Sociocultural Change in the American Southwest, by Jeffrey S. Dean2. Social Memory4. Environmental Perception and Human Responses in History a…
Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest
Sustainability of complex societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
Archeology
Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology
Part I. Introduction: 1. Another way of telling: Marxist perspectives in archaeology Matthew Spriggs Part II. Situating the Economic: 2. The economy and kinship: a critical examination of some of the ideas of Marx and Levi-Strauss C. A. Gregory 3. The motion of craft specialization and its presentation in the archaeological record of early states in the Turanian Basin Maurizio Tosi 4. Towards the quantification of productive forces in archaeology…
L'Effondrement des Societes Complexes
Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse
The literature on sustainability and the human future emphasizes the belief that population and/or mass consumption caused resource degradation and collapse in earlier societies. Archaeological literature proposing overshoot and collapse appears in current debates over resource conservation versus continued economic growth. The prominence of this debate, with its national and international dimensions, makes it important to assess whether there is…
Social inference and mortuary practices
Recent cross‐cultural studies of ethnographically recorded mortuary procedures indicate that variations in the form of mortuary ritual symbolize and reflect the membership of the deceased in the components of a social system. Such formal patterns of burial procedure can best be identified archaeologically through the numerical classification of mortuary attributes. A general interpretive orientation towards the study of mortuary practices is deve…
Energy, complexity, and sustainability
Sustainability of complex societies
Problem Solving
Epistemology of the Significance Concept
Although the concept of significance has been widely discussed in cultural resource management, the origin of the idea and the epistemology underlying it have remained unexamined. This paper outlines the history of the significance concept in historic preservation and traces the current view of significance to the empiricist-positivist school of Western philosophical thought. Flaws in the arguments of this school, and in the logic of the signific…
An archaeological analysis of social ranking and residence groups in prehistoric Hawaii
The complex political systems of aboriginal Polynesia have been of prominence in anthropological discussions of social and cultural evolution. This characteristic suggests that the archaeological record of Polynesia may be of critical value in testing propositions concerning variation and change in complex societies. This paper concentrates on the development of a conceptual framework and analytical methods for the study of prehistoric Polynesian…
Behavior and Status in a Middle Woodland Mortuary Population from the Illinois Valley
One shortcoming of the archaeological study of prehistoric societies is a failure to pursue the behavioral correlates of social distinctions. This paper shows, through a study of Middle Woodland mortuary populations, that analysis of degenerative joint disease is a productive approach to investigating status-linked behavior in archaeological populations
Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment
Collapse is a perennial topic among historical scholars, and a favorite source of lessons for our future. Collapse literature often reflects contemporary fears and aspirations. The four books discussed here mirror today's concern with anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change, and for better or worse, influence a reading public far beyond the academy. Two books focus on an individual collapse—the Classic Maya—and two aspire to a …
Tropical Landscapes and the Ancient Maya
Archaeologists have begun to understand that many of the challenges facing our technologically sophisticated, resource dependent, urban systems were also destabilizing factors in ancient complex societies. The focus of IHOPE-Maya is to identify how humans living in the tropical Maya Lowlands in present-day Central America responded to and impacted their environments over the past three millennia, and to relate knowledge of those processes to mode…
Collapse and Sustainability
The factors that make a society sustainable, or vulnerable to collapse, can rarely be discerned within a human lifetime. Sustainability challenges develop over periods of decades, generations, or centuries. Sustainability must therefore be a historical science. A major challenge of the IHOPE program is how to draw valid comparisons among different kinds of societies, existing at different times, that can clarify our contemporary problems of susta…
The Mountainair Lithic Scatters
The Mountainair Lithic Scatters represent a kind of site all too frequently ignored by archaeologists. This paper suggests that field survey involving small projects should anticipate that isolated surface scatters can, with certain limitations, be placed into a settlement-pattern framework
Reply to “A Critique of Some Recent North American Mortuary Studies
Braun's critique is characterized by misleading statements, by misrepresentations of my work, and by repetition of cautions that I have already voiced
Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
Social inference and mortuary practices
Recent cross‐cultural studies of ethnographically recorded mortuary procedures indicate that variations in the form of mortuary ritual symbolize and reflect the membership of the deceased in the components of a social system. Such formal patterns of burial procedure can best be identified archaeologically through the numerical classification of mortuary attributes. A general interpretive orientation towards the study of mortuary practices is deve…
An archaeological analysis of social ranking and residence groups in prehistoric Hawaii
The complex political systems of aboriginal Polynesia have been of prominence in anthropological discussions of social and cultural evolution. This characteristic suggests that the archaeological record of Polynesia may be of critical value in testing propositions concerning variation and change in complex societies. This paper concentrates on the development of a conceptual framework and analytical methods for the study of prehistoric Polynesian…
Mortuary Practices and the Study of Prehistoric Social Systems
The Mountainair Lithic Scatters
The Mountainair Lithic Scatters represent a kind of site all too frequently ignored by archaeologists. This paper suggests that field survey involving small projects should anticipate that isolated surface scatters can, with certain limitations, be placed into a settlement-pattern framework
Behavior and Status in a Middle Woodland Mortuary Population from the Illinois Valley
One shortcoming of the archaeological study of prehistoric societies is a failure to pursue the behavioral correlates of social distinctions. This paper shows, through a study of Middle Woodland mortuary populations, that analysis of degenerative joint disease is a productive approach to investigating status-linked behavior in archaeological populations
Reply to “A Critique of Some Recent North American Mortuary Studies
Braun's critique is characterized by misleading statements, by misrepresentations of my work, and by repetition of cautions that I have already voiced
Woodland Social Change in the Central Midwest
The analysis of Middle Woodland to Late Woodland social change in west-central Illinois has produced contrasting interpretations of decreasing and increasing complexity. This paper evaluates both views, showing that available evidence is most consistent with the interpretation of social collapse at the Middle to Late Woodland transition
Epistemology of the Significance Concept
Although the concept of significance has been widely discussed in cultural resource management, the origin of the idea and the epistemology underlying it have remained unexamined. This paper outlines the history of the significance concept in historic preservation and traces the current view of significance to the empiricist-positivist school of Western philosophical thought. Flaws in the arguments of this school, and in the logic of the signific…
Archeology
Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology
Part I. Introduction: 1. Another way of telling: Marxist perspectives in archaeology Matthew Spriggs Part II. Situating the Economic: 2. The economy and kinship: a critical examination of some of the ideas of Marx and Levi-Strauss C. A. Gregory 3. The motion of craft specialization and its presentation in the archaeological record of early states in the Turanian Basin Maurizio Tosi 4. Towards the quantification of productive forces in archaeology…
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Collapse of Complex Societies
Sustainability of complex societies
Understanding Complexity in the Prehistoric Southwest
Problem Solving
The way the wind blows
List of IllustrationsList of TablesNotes on the Contributors1. Climate, History, and Human Action, by Roderick J. McIntosh, Joseph A. Tainter, and Susan Keech Mc Intosh1. Climate, Environment, and Human Action2. Climate Variability During the Holocene: An Update, by Robert B. Dunbar3. Complexity Theory and Sociocultural Change in the American Southwest, by Jeffrey S. Dean2. Social Memory4. Environmental Perception and Human Responses in History a…
Resource Transitions and Energy Gain
"Energy gain constrains resource use, social organization, and landscape organization in human and other living systems. Changes in energy gain have common characteristics across living systems. We describe these commonalities in selected case studies involving imperial taxation, fungus-farming ants, and North American beaver, and propose a suite of hypotheses for the organization of systems that subsist on different levels of energy gain. Organi…
Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse
The literature on sustainability and the human future emphasizes the belief that population and/or mass consumption caused resource degradation and collapse in earlier societies. Archaeological literature proposing overshoot and collapse appears in current debates over resource conservation versus continued economic growth. The prominence of this debate, with its national and international dimensions, makes it important to assess whether there is…
Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History
Book Review| January 01 2008 Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History. Bradley J. Parker and Lars Rodseth. Joseph A. Tainter Joseph A. Tainter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2008) 82 (1): 137–138. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-82.1.137 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J…
Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment
Collapse is a perennial topic among historical scholars, and a favorite source of lessons for our future. Collapse literature often reflects contemporary fears and aspirations. The four books discussed here mirror today's concern with anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change, and for better or worse, influence a reading public far beyond the academy. Two books focus on an individual collapse—the Classic Maya—and two aspire to a …
The Recurring Dark Ages
Energy, complexity, and sustainability
L'Effondrement des Societes Complexes
Archaeology (17 works) · History (17 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (14 works) · Geography (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · History (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Ecology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Economics (8 works)