Ritual, Labor, and the Evolution of Cooperation

The link between the evolution of complex political organizations and ritually-regulated labor is central to the emergence of complex political economies.  Ritual provides the public benchmarks that tie in elite reciprocity of surplus to continued nonelite participation in complex economies of scale.  These labor organizations are central to the evolution of complex cooperative groups, the basis of surplus-producing intermediate level (pre-state) societies that developed in a non-coercive cultural landscape.