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This paper aims to derive a time and place invariant definition of entrepreneurship necessary for the identification of prehistoric entrepreneurial behavior.

The definition was derived by correlating a diverse set of archeological artifacts that could correspond to entrepreneurial activity with established anthropological and historical evidence of ancient entrepreneurial activity. The definition was formulated as a compact operational definition to ensure it could produce yes or no answers to whether specific archeological, anthropological or historical records could be associated with entrepreneurial activity.

This effort produced a unique time and place independent definition of entrepreneur that enables the identification of prehistoric entrepreneurial activity and heretofore unrealized structure of entrepreneurial activity. Specifically, entrepreneurship as defined herein predates social hierarchy, political economy, markets and pricing mechanisms. Modern definitions often inconsistently limit the scope of entrepreneurial behavior.

This analysis was performed based upon specific, not exhaustive, sets of archeological, anthropological and historical records. Unexamined records or new discoveries could yield examples of entrepreneurial activity that transcend this definition.

This definition challenges how we think about, measure and model entrepreneurial impact today and opens new avenues of inquiry to understanding the social and economic impacts of entrepreneurial behavior.

A time and place invariant operational definition of entrepreneurship that could precisely identify entrepreneurial activity in the archeological record has not existed before. The definition enables the author to identify entrepreneurial activity among hunter-gatherers and in other locations not previously identified.

In 1993, inspired by Sansone's (1998) book on the origin of sport, I speculated about sport mascots and cultural performance in an article published in the Journal of Sport & Social Issues (Sydnor-Slowikowski, 1993). It was a tentative piece that combined some of Sansone's ethological thesis with performativity/performance studies to contemplate contemporary collective/social authenticity, imperialist nostalgia and to critique racist ideologies linked to sport mascots, such as that of Chief Illiniwek, the University of Illinois’ stereotyped mascot of a mythical Native American.

The popularity of garden peas, now easily our most widely favoured green vegetable, is nothing new in the history of human food. Pea seeds were the regular food of many races of prehistoric man, wherever the wild plants grew naturally in the Middle East, Ethiopia and Mid‐Asia. The remains of such seeds have been found in many prehistoric sites, including the Swiss lake dwellings of the Bronze Age dating back some 5,000 years.

Archaeological evidence from the prehistoric Spondylus industry of coastal Ecuador is analyzed here to clarify how craft production was structured and the role that it played in the rise of social complexity. Many models of social development propose that elite cooption of specialized craft production can be a useful avenue through which aspiring elites can gain differential status. Contrary to the expectations of these models, data from coastal Ecuador indicates that craft production of sumptuary goods was an activity primarily carried out by household units for the benefit of the domestic economy. Increased trafficking with northern Peruvian states at ca. 750 seems to have promoted local social stratification by attracting large numbers of households to the restricted locales where they could exploit these resources, which in turn prompted a strengthening of the kinds of political conditions that facilitate orderly interaction and minimize internal social conflict.

This chapter is about the theories explaining the transition from foraging to farming. It aims to establish which links exist between the traditional theories – based on push/pull models – and the micro-founded approaches developed since the 1980s. More precisely, it asks how the latter may contribute, as the former did, to defining a macro-narrative of the transition to farming.

While they were providing a global narrative of the Neolithic revolution, the push and pull models have been progressively dismissed. Recent research is diverse, but it is all based upon human behaviour or micro-founded. We critically examine three of these approaches which focus either on foraging behaviour, or on the initial domestication of plants and animals, or on the evolution of social institutions related to ownership.

We demonstrate that these recent micro-founded approaches only provide a partial vision of the transition to farming. Despite this limit, they conciliate push and pull explanations in a single framework. Moreover, they confirm a conclusion held by tenants of pull models: the transition to farming is more likely to have occurred in a resource-rich environment such as the one associated with complex hunter-gatherers. Some archaeological evidence from the Levant is provided to support our claim.

This research chapter provides a useful overview of the differing approaches to the behavioural, environmental and economic factors that led to the shift to farming from foraging. Its value lies in the way it presents and evaluates differing positions derived from differing scales of analysis and types of evidence.