Modeling the Dynamics of Diversification

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Quantifying diversity is one of the most fundamental components of both a scientific and evolutionary approach to archaeology. While archaeologists have spent decades painstakingly describing diversity, we continue to lack a comprehensive understanding on broader evolutionary patterns of diversification. This work applies a novel Bayesian modeling approach, developed in quantitative paleontology, to estimate rates of technological innovation and extinction. This approach offers improvements over existing methodologies by providing a quantitative framework to estimate rates of diversification that does not rely on strong phylogenetic assumptions and only requires data on the occurrence (times of first and last appearance) of artifact lineages. Quantitative analysis of ceramic data from the Southwest Social Networks Database will be demonstrated using the program PyRate with visualization of results using tools from R. Results highlight a dynamic pattern of technological change with strong responses to social and environmental perturbations. Broadly, this work contributes to a growing set of computational methods that give greater flexibility for comparing and contrasting patterns of technological change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24573