title: Reconstructing the history of marriage strategies in Indo-European-speaking societies: monogamy and polygyny.
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.
authors: Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H OBW, UK.
authors: Laura
authors: L
authors: Fortunato
mesh_terms: D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D005006:Ethnicity / Q000266:history; D005060:Europe; D049668:History, 15th Century; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D049690:History, Ancient; D049691:History, Medieval; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language / Q000266:history*; D008393:Marriage / Q000266:history / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D058974:Phylogeography; D044465:White People