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From Past to Present: The Deep History of Kinship

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Integrating Qualitative and Social Science Factors in Archaeological Modelling

Part of the book series: Computational Social Sciences ((SIPA))

Abstract

Anthropological research has long established the central importance in human societies of the shared, conceptual systems of social relations we refer to as kinship systems in providing a foundation for culturally formulated systems of social interaction. Historically, and from an evolutionary perspective, kinship systems came into play even before the Upper Paleolithic as our ancestors worked out, during hominin evolution, a qualitative transformation away from the individualistic, face-to-face systems of social interaction of the great apes to the relation-based systems of social interaction that characterize human societies. This transformation, realized through the monumental intellectual achievement of working out computational systems of kinship relations expressed through kinship terminologies, has also provided a framework for accommodating two diametrically opposed drivers of social interaction: the centrifugal effect of individual interests and the centripetal effect of social constraints.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Dwight W. Read

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  1. Dwight W. Read
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Correspondence to Dwight W. Read .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. UMR CNRS 5602 GEODE, Géographie de l’Environnement Maison de la Recherche, Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France

    Mehdi Saqalli

  2. Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge CB2 3Dz, Cambridge, UK

    Marc Vander Linden

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Read, D.W. (2019). From Past to Present: The Deep History of Kinship. In: Saqalli, M., Vander Linden, M. (eds) Integrating Qualitative and Social Science Factors in Archaeological Modelling. Computational Social Sciences(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12723-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12723-7_6

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