Document Type
Open Access Article
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.
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Recommended Citation
Fortunato, Laura
(2011)
"Reconstructing the History of Marriage Strategies in Indo-European–Speaking Societies: Monogamy and Polygyny,"
Human Biology:
Vol. 83:
Iss.
1, Article 6.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol/vol83/iss1/6
