Closely related to my research into social inequality and bargaining processes among humans is the study of territoriality from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. In the ethological sense, territoriality refers to the capacity and propensity of an organism or group of organisms to defend a geographical area against intruders. During the 1970s, Rada Dyson-Hudson and Eric Alden Smith brought the ethological concept of territoriality into anthropology. This research had two purposes. The first purpose was to expose the notion of a universally human territorial imperative, popularized by playwright-cum-anthropologist Robert Ardrey, as overly simplistic. The second purpose was to replace this simplistic view with hypotheses implicating ecologically underpinnings of cross-cultural diversity in territoriality. The underlying logic of these models is resource defensibility. If the costs of defending a territory exceed the benefits, or if non-territorial alternatives yield higher payoffs, organisms will be less territorial. While much progress has been made in the evolutionary ecology of terrioriality since the mid-20th century, confusion remains when the concepts are brought to bear in fields without an evolutionary focus. Ecological models of territoriality are conflated with political and administrative definitions of territory, and evolutionary explanations are misconstrued as holding human as fixed and immutable. Furthermore, the ethological models of territoriality are individualistic, causing some to question their merit when applied to higher levels of population aggregation. Finally, some archaeologists studying ancient polities question the usefulness of territorial models that focus on the control of inert geographic space, suggesting that such models perpetuate the long tradition of representing ancient empires as "blobs on a map."
In spring of 2009, I was asked, along with Eric Alden Smith, to begin work on a paper - intended for publication in a plenary volume - that updates the ecological concept of territoriality and interfaces it with political economic theory from the more humanistic tradition. This paper will posit that ecological models of territoriality, and evolutionary ecology in general, predicts rich, complex, conditional behavioral strategies that are cross-culturally diverse and spatio-temporally dynamic. Far from representing ancient political behavior as taking place between inert blobs of geographic space, the resource defensibility concept at the heart of the ecological theory is extensible to geographic and social resources that are constantly in flux, such as trade networks and labor markets. Finally, we will demonstrate how the ecological model of territoriality applies uniquely at different levels of population aggregation, and different resource types, but that strategies applied to different aggregation levels and resource types interact in complex ways. | 
