Author Description

On the cutting edge of world-systems theory comes The Wintu and Their Neighbors: A Very Small World-System in Northern California, the first case study to compare and contrast systematically in indigenous Native American society with the modern world at large. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, and history, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly M. Mann have scoured the archaeological record of the Wintu, an aboriginal people without agriculture, metallurgy, or class structure, who lived in the wooded valleys and hills of Northern California. By studying the household composition, kinship, and trade relations of the Wintu, they call into question some of the basic assumptions of prior sociological theory and analysis.