Lessons From The Past About Living Together In The Present

Understanding and promoting ways that people can work cooperatively and collectively towards shared goals is a long-standing and enduring challenge that some of the earliest social theorists grappled with. However, definitions of shared goals and strategies for pursuing them vary culturally and through time. In our globalized present, the most pressing concerns operate at the planetary scale of climate change mitigation, international nuclear treaties, infectious disease pandemics, and others that affect sustaining life on Earth as we know it. In the grand scope of human history, these are concerns have only been realized relatively recently. Others have consumed humans for millennia, yet are still relevant today and establish the foundations for addressing global challenges: making a living and providing for one’s family or more extended kin networks, getting along with and making shared decisions with neighbors regarding our neighborhoods, towns, and cities, and creating and sustaining societal norms and institutions that are generally trusted and provide a widely shared sense of being well governed. For these, the historical and archaeological record attests to relative successes and failures that can inform our thinking and our efforts today. In this book, Gary and David set out to consider a suite of interdisciplinary frameworks for how and why people work together to manage resources, cooperate as groups larger than families, and sustain governing institutions that are relatively trusted and more pluralistic, meaning providing a voice in decision-making to more people. They draw on cases from different parts of the world to illustrate key concepts that can be applied to considerations of societal organization in any particular region or time period. In subsequent sections they narrow the focus to Mesoamerica, in a suite of case studies, in order to outline the concepts more fully and apply them more concretely to specific social institutions and archaeological contexts.
January 26. 2024