Vessels and villages: evidence for conformist transmission in early village aggregations on the Pajarito Plateau, New Mexico

Since at least the early 1900s archaeologists have been debating why villages form in the pre-hispanic US Southwest. Less emphasis has been placed on the factors enabling differential persistence of villages, once formed; yet village life poses problems of social coordination. We find that data from a recently excavated Late Coalition period village on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico, Burnt Mesa Pueblo, exhibits less diversity in ceramic style than would be expected, if ceramic styles were neutral, using as a baseline the ceramic diversity that typifies local hamlets of the Early Coalition period. The evidence suggests that the local transmission processes affecting ceramic design were biased towards conformity (i.e., exhibit frequency-dependent bias). We take conformity in ceramic design to be one symptom of a developing social system that places great value on within-group cooperation, helping alleviate cooperative dilemmas in these early aggregates. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.