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Abstract Explanations for the emergence of monogamous marriage have focused on the cross-cultural distribution of marriage strategies, thus failing to account for their history. In this paper I reconstruct the pattern of change in marriage strategies in the history of societies speaking Indo-European languages, using cross-cultural data in the systematic and explicitly historical framework afforded by the phylogenetic comparative approach.
The analysis provides evidence in support of Proto-Indo-European monogamy, and that this pattern may have extended back to Proto-Indo-Hittite. These reconstructions push the origin of monogamous marriage into prehistory, well beyond the earliest instances documented in the historical record; this, in turn, challenges notions that the cross-cultural distribution of monogamous marriage reflects features of social organization typically associated with Eurasian societies, and with "societal complexity" and "modernization" more generally. I discuss implications of these findings in the context of the archaeological and genetic evidence on prehistoric social organization.
KEY WORDS: INDO-EUROPEAN, CULTURAL PHYLOGENETICS, MARRIAGE, MONOGAMY, POLYGYNY.
Introduction
Background. Explanations for monogamous marriage have centered around the prevalence of this practice in Eurasia (Holy 1996, pp. 62-63), linking its emergence to the development of idiosyncratic features of societies in the region. These include, for example, the establishment of large nation states (e.g., Alexander 1987) and democracy (e.g., Fox 1997); the spread of Christianity (e.g., Goody 1983, 2000); the onset of industrialization and urbanization (e.g., Betzig 1982, 1986; van den Berghe and Barasti 1977), and of economic development more generally (e.g., Gould et al. 2008). Consistently, cross-cultural analyses show that societies scoring high on scales measuring "societal complexity" tend toward monogamous marriage (Levinson and Malone 1980, p. 37; e.g., Blumberg and Winch 1972; Lee 1979; McNett 1973; Osmond 1965, 1969; Sheils 1971).
By focusing on the cross-cultural distribution of marriage strategies, these studies fail to account for their history. Restrictions on polygynous marriage appear in the earliest historical records, long predating the development of aspects of social organization typically associated with Eurasian societies and with "societal complexity" and "modernization" more generally (see review in Scheidel 2009 and discussion in Fortunato and Archetti 2010). In this paper I reconstruct the pattern of change in marriage strategies in the history of societies speaking Indo-European (IE) languages, using cross-cultural data in the systematic and explicitly historical framework afforded by...