Cooperation is a markedly human mix of innate and learned behaviour, and a key to tackling some of our greatest concerns. People of all kinds can collaborate voluntarily on collective and ambitious goals. Paradoxically, however, studies of social dynamics often focus on hierarchies, state formation and political structures ruled by coercive power, with comparatively little regard to the mechanisms whereby humans voluntarily collaborate.
Encouragingly, new research on collective action is heralding a fundamental transformation. With growing intensity, some scholars are analysing complex forms of social organisation that do not require states, capitalist market forces or other kinds of coercive hierarchies, and which cannot be neatly fitted into traditional historical narratives of ever-growing inequality.
Still, there is a perplexing lack of research on cooperation and collaboration in the production of luxury items, i.e. those materialising exceptional expense in materials and/or labour, and not geared towards subsistence. Implicitly, we are perpetuating the fallacy that complex technologies are the preserve of hierarchical societies with strong division of labour, as well as projecting an ethnocentric understanding of luxury.
REVERSEACTION aims to tackle an important question that has not been the target of research before: how can complex technological systems be sustained in the absence of coercive political administrations and capitalist market forces?
A core research approach to this aim is the reverse engineering of archaeological technologies, focusing primarily on the comparative study of two complex stateless societies of pre-Hispanic South America: Muisca and Nariño (~AD 400-1600). We are also developing studies of other archaeological societies in South America, Africa and Europe, as well as modern cooperatives. We deploy advanced archaeological science methods for the investigation of archaeological goldwork, ceramics, textiles and precious stones produced, traded and used in stateless societies, and foster exploratory collaborations with anthropology, sociology, management studies and various crafts.
