Projetos
Social Complexity and Collapse in Ancient World-Systems
Daniel Barreiros
This project examines the emergence, evolution, and dissolution of world-systems spanning from the Neolithic period through pre-modern civilizations. Moving beyond Wallerstein's capitalist-centric framework, it adopts a substantivist economic perspective that recognizes diverse forms of intersocietal articulation predating European maritime expansion by millennia. Central to this analysis is the concept of systemic organicity—the extent to which flows of goods, people, services, and information become structurally indispensable for maintaining the integrity of constituent entities. Through functional specialization and division of labor, hierarchical networks emerged where local actions generated cascading effects throughout the entire system. The circulation of essential goods like food and raw materials operated alongside prestige items, both playing complementary roles in maintaining social complexity and political structures across vast geographical distances. Ecological factors profoundly shaped these systemic dynamics, as environmental pressures, resource scarcity, and climatic fluctuations created adaptive challenges that drove technological innovation, territorial expansion, and ultimately system-wide vulnerabilities. When anthropogenic environmental degradation intersected with natural climate cycles, it often triggered chain reactions leading to agricultural crises, population movements, and epidemic diseases capable of destabilizing entire transcontinental networks. By examining ancient world-systems as nested structures operating across multiple temporal and spatial scales, this research contributes to understanding how complex societies emerge, maintain stability, and experience collapse through their fundamental interconnectedness with both human networks and natural environments.
Cognitive Evolution and Economic Behavior
Bernardo Sá
Since Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) critique of expected utility theory, economics has incorporated cognitive elements into decision analysis. This project proposes a long-term perspective, investigating how the evolution of hominin cognition shaped heuristics and biases that influence present-day economic behavior. The proposal integrates evidence from evolutionary psychology, neuroeconomics, and decision theory, aiming to expand the explanatory power of economic models based on biological and institutional foundations, in line with the transdisciplinary approach to the evolution of cognition and social structures.
The Climate Question in Historical Transition Processes
Daniel Vainfas
The relationship between humanity and the environment is a dialectical one, shaped both by human impact on environmental conditions and by the environment's influence on human societies. This interplay has been a constant throughout history, though it becomes particularly evident during periods of significant climatic instability. Such periods often overlap—both temporally and geographically—with historical moments of upheaval and transition, whether political, economic, or social. This research project seeks to explore the mutual conditioning relationships between these transitional processes—such as the shift from feudalism to capitalism—and the climatic transformations unfolding during those pivotal times
Pre-Columbian long-distance exchanges: agent-based modeling of an Andean-Mesoamerican maritime route
Gabriel Ribeiro
Several socioeconomic dynamics of the pre-Columbian world are difficult or impossible to understand due to the lack of historical records, whether due to the lack of written language, interruption of oral tradition, or destruction of knowledge. Among these dynamics are long-distance exchanges that, going beyond simple subsistence, can reveal considerable details about the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural organization of various peoples. However, the lack of information about some typical elements of long-distance exchanges, such as values, pricing, taxation, means of exchange, and distribution, makes it considerably difficult to understand what the Americas were like until the mid-16th century. To deal with this problem, it is possible to generate an agent-based model that, when receiving information based on existing historical records, can be calibrated through appropriate variables and dynamics to generate the most likely data to fill archaeological gaps. The first case to be examined here is that of a sea route between the Pacific coasts of present-day Ecuador and Mexico, since it has historical records, in addition to technical and meteorological evidence, of long-distance exchanges carried out between the peoples who inhabited these regions.
Convergent Histories, Diverging Futures: Societies, Parallels and Trajectories
Felipe Aguiar
This study examines the convergence of institutional and economic complexity that emerged across various pre-industrial societies over time. Drawing upon the theoretical framework developed by Jack Goldstone and scholars associated with the California School of Economic History, the research investigates how distinct agrarian societies—each shaped by specific historical, environmental, and societal conditions—developed analogous social, political, and economic structures, as well as comparable institutional arrangements that facilitated interconnection. The analysis adopts a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating comparative economic, political, and institutional history, while also engaging with perspectives from sociology, social history, and the history of technology.
Circumscription and Social Complexity
Arquimedes Celestino
This research project aims to examine Robert Carneiro’s Theory of Circumscription as an analytical tool for understanding the rise of complexity in political and economic systems. It analyzes the applicability of the factors proposed by Carneiro for the formation of early states in later cultural and historical contexts. The project proposes a conceptual expansion of circumscription, articulating it with notions of boundaries and the absence of alternatives. The study is interdisciplinary in nature, incorporating contributions from Anthropology, Political Economy, and Global Power Theory, with the goal of constructing an explanatory model for processes of sociopolitical complexity escalation.
Nomadic Empires, Money, and the Monetization of the Silk Road
Guilherme Fritz
This research explores the significance of nomadic peoples in the functioning of the Silk Road, focusing on their role in the monetization of this intercivilizational corridor. The Silk Road comprised a vast network of trade routes linking Afro-Eurasia, the cradle of diverse social formations. Among these, prominent sedentary empires—such as China, Rome, Persia, and Maurya—stood out. Yet non-sedentary but equally complex societies, including nomadic empires and peoples like the Mongols, Timurids, and Huns, also shaped this intersocietal landscape. This study aims to analyze how the interplay between these distinct social systems, money, and currency influenced the formation and operation of the Silk Road.
