evolutionary archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-6 (6 Records)
The colonization of Polynesia was a motivated dispersal of culturally related human populations on a massive geographic scale. The settlement of distant oceanic islands involved the development and sharing of technological information specific to local environments, including exclusively stylistic aspects of artifact design. A reassessment of artifact comparisons from a neo-Darwinian evolutionary perspective continues to provide information regarding social interaction among island communities....
Measuring Cultural Relatedness Using Multiple Seriation Ordering Algorithms (2016)
Seriation is a long-standing archaeological method for relative dating that has proven effective in probing regional-scale patterns of inheritance, social networks, and cultural contact in their full spatiotemporal context. The orderings produced by seriation are produced by the continuity of class distributions and unimodality of class frequencies, properties that are related to social learning and transmission models studied by evolutionary archaeologists. Linking seriation to social learning...
Phylogenetic Approaches in Examining Western North American Rock Art: The Evolution of the Shield-Bearing Warrior Motif (2016)
The present study examines rock art and its ritual landscapes as the physical remnants of evolving cultural traditions. By incorporating an evolutionary framework in rock art studies, we can determine if rock art traditions evolved via descent with modification versus blending and borrowing of ideas. This project focuses on Fremont and Ceremonial Style shield-bearing warrior motifs associated with ritual contexts and spaces (animal medicine, cosmology, and shamanism). Drawing upon several...
Selective Conditions for Obsidian Stone Tool Manufacture and Use in Central Washington State (2015)
The presence of obsidian in chipped stone tool assemblages in central Washington State is well known. Local, low quality obsidian sources have been documented occurring in conjunction with more commonly found nonlocal, high quality obsidian sources. Though the archaeological occurrence of obsidian is well documented in this area, a systematic study of the organization of technology using evolutionary archaeological approach can help clarify how obsidian was selected and incorporated into stone...
Testing Dunnell’s Waste Explanation for Monument Building with an Agent-Based Model (2018)
The construction of shrines, tombs, and other monuments is one of the most puzzling human behaviors from an evolutionary perspective. Building monuments is costly in terms of time and energy, and yet it is difficult to see how it contributes to survival and reproduction. In the late 1980s, Dunnell argued that monument building and other apparently wasteful behaviors are in fact adaptive in environments that are characterized by severe and/or unpredictable perturbations. Such behaviors are...
Using glyphic variation to infer the social and spatial scale of learning among Classic Maya scribes (2015)
This study uses Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions to trace the evolution of alternative writing conventions during the Classic period (ca. 250-900 CE). The third person ergative pronoun u- is represented by up to a dozen different graphemes in Classic Maya writing. These glyphs are also the most common set of signs found in the corpus of hieroglyphic inscriptions, regardless of media. The variation and frequency of these signs provide data to model cultural forces that shaped this writing system....