Abstract
Christopher Chase-Dunn and colleagues have demonstrated cycles of synchronous growth and decline in cities in East Asia and in the Mediterranean. They argue that synchrony is rooted in systems of economic and political interdependence, cutting across broad regions of the world for long periods of history. Using a new strategy for cross-cultural research in the anthropological sciences—archaeoethnology, the cross-cultural analysis of archaeological cultures in a diachronic mode—the author examines whether settlement synchrony has occurred in the New World and if so, whether it implies widespread economic and political interdependencies across long periods of time.
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