Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey. Robert Bettinger.

The behavioral ecological approach Kelly champions in the Foraging Spectrum has clearly enhanced our understanding of hunter-gatherer diversity. Still, despite important developments in modeling and comparative analysis in the twenty years since first publication, occasional stark contrasts between groups living in similar environments suggest that ecological factors and adaptive behaviors cannot alone account for the impressive record of ethnographic and archaeological diversity. We consider...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Paige.

The past 5 years have seen new lithic studies inferring the degree of contact between and migrations of Pleistocene hominin populations (Tostevin 2013, Scerri et al. 2014). Their methodologies are grounded in a rigorously defined middle range theory, but independent tests of the approach have only recently begun. Bridging the gap between individual knapping events, and the trans-generational patterns we see in the archaeological record will likely require multiple approaches, including applying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boulanger.

The Paleoindian (ca. 13,000–11,000 calBP) record of eastern North America has long been characterized as exhibiting a remarkable variety of fluted-point forms. The temporal, spatial, and cultural significance of this variety remains poorly understood owing to a sparse radiocarbon record as well as to inconsistencies in nomenclature and traits used to define point forms. Building on previous studies, paradigmatic classification is used to create replicable fluted-point classes from a large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David G. Hyde.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations of historic industrial sites in the American West have long been dominated by questions surrounding power, resistance, and the emergence of class structures and ideologies. While these questions are still relevant, these sites offer the potential for a much wider range of anthropologically situated research that extends beyond...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Mountjoy. Jill Rhodes.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly unusual tightly wrapped bundle burials of previously cleaned and carefully arranged disarticulated human bones dating to the Middle Formative have been discovered by archaeologists at three sites in western Jalisco, Mexico, one site on the Pacific coastal plain in far northern Sinaloa, Mexico and eroding out of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Sauer. Teresa Franco.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through multiple research projects, collaborations, and university appointments, Tom Dillehay impacted anthropological investigations throughout Chile, from the northern coasts of the Atacama desert south to the temperate forests of Patagonia, and the entire length of the Andes. Though multifaceted in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo De Lombera-Hermida. Geoffrey Clark. Xosé Pedro Rodríguez-Álvarez. Ramón Fábregas-Valcarce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Northwest Iberia is a Paleozoic territory almost void of flint outcrops. The arrival of Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic groups, used to flintknapping, to a new lithological region implied a reorganization of their technological basis. The analysis of four lithic assemblages, ranging from the Aurignacian to the Final Magdalenian/Azilian, allows us to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Ranhorn. Francys Subiaul. David Braun. Alison Brooks. Robert Kaplan.

The potential to detect signatures of cultural transmission in stone tool technology is quickly gaining traction in Paleolithic archaeology (e.g. Tostevin 2012). These methods, rooted in middle range theory, remain to be tested through controlled experiment. This project uses experimental flint knapping and a social learning framework to test the hypothesis that signatures of direct cultural transmission can be detected in core reduction strategies. The participant pool included experienced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheng Liu. Nada Khreisheh. Dietrich Stout. Justin Pargeter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the extensive literature focusing on Acheulean bifaces, especially the sources and meaning of their morphological variability, many aspects of this topic remain elusive. Archaeologists cite many factors that contribute to the considerable variation of biface morphology, including knapper skill levels and mental templates. Here we present results...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Paula Dupuy. Taylor Hermes.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past 25 years has led to a completely new understanding of Eurasian Prehistory. Archaeometric analysis, landscape archaeology, and aDNA have allowed longstanding debates to be silenced, and fundamental principles underpinning key concepts such as social interaction,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Fish. Suzanne Fish.

We examine multi-ethnicity as a persistent and integral dimension within an overarching concept of Hohokam as a holistic archaeological tradition centered on O’odham peoples in central and southern Arizona. Internal and external multi-ethnic relationships of many sorts abound in the ethnography, oral history, and ethnohistory of descendant O’odham peoples in former Hohokam territory. Post-contact O’odham sources document the expansive geographic range and the multi-faceted nature of such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liping Yang.

This is an abstract from the "Technology and Design in 4th and 3rd Millennium BCE China" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cultural sequence of the Wei River valley, as exemplified by Miaodigou Culture of the Middle Yangshao Period, represents a pinnacle as reflected in its masterfully crafted ceramics. The classical forms are pointed-bottomed amphorae, flat-bottomed bottles, coarseware jars, deep basins, and deep bowls. Of special importance are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eszter Bánffy.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The advent of the Neolithic period in Europe, as elsewhere globally, represents a powerful transformation in human history. In spite of important contributions, neither global explanations nor single-site-based case studies have so far led to a general model for the history (histories) of the transformation. This is what our new project intends to challenge....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Briggs Buchanan. Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The migration of Athapaskan (alternatively, Athabaskan or Na-Dene) groups from the Subarctic regions of northwestern Canada and Alaska to the American Southwest is one of the longest and best documented movements of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The starkly different environment of the Southwest and the subsequent interactions with Southwest peoples...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Sykes. Greger Larson. Carly Ameen. Philip Shaw. Tom Fowler.

Human immigration and biological invasions are high-profile topics in modern politics but neither are modern phenomena. Migrations of people, animals and ideas were widespread in antiquity and these are frequently incorporated into expressions of cultural identity. However, the more recent the migrations, the more negative modern attitudes are towards them. In general, native is perceived as positive and 'natural', whereas the term 'alien' is attached negatively to cultural and environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke Premo.

The "demographic hypothesis" provides a recent example of how models can play an important role in driving new and interesting archaeological research. Influential models by Shennan and Henrich inspired the notion that, holding all else constant, members of larger populations ought to display more diverse and more complex toolkits than those in smaller populations. Empirical tests of this idea against the material culture of recent small-scale societies have yielded mixed results, raising valid...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrico Crema.

Empirical validation is a key stage of any model development process and should provide an objective and quantitative account of the model performance. Yet, too often this stage plays a marginal role in the inferential exercise, with many discussions almost exclusively dedicated on the model building process. This paper discusses this neglected aspect of archaeological simulation, distinguishing two approaches drawn from epistemological parallels with statistical modelling. The first utilises...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Masucci. John Hoopes.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long noted similarities in ceramic technologies and traditions between Costa Rica and Ecuador. These are relevant for models of culture change, whether the result of direct interactions or parallel cultural processes in the emergence of social complexity. We test the alternatives of direct,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Rorabaugh.

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. A growing concern in archaeology is the potential inaccessibility of various methodological and theoretical approaches in non-academic contexts. Open access and open source software (R, Quantum GIS, ImageJ) provide means for applying complex analyses within a budget, but due to cybersecurity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Moore.

Social learning by modern humans led to the repetition and persistence of stone tool forms we see in the recent archaeological record. The emergence of similar patterning in early hominin assemblages is often assumed to track the beginnings of social learning. Less clear is what was being socially transmitted during this early period. One possibility is that hominins learned how to make objects according to a shared ‘mental template’. A second possibility is that specific sequences were learned,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Reed. Linn Gassaway.

This is an abstract from the "Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me: What Have We Learned Over the Past 40 Years and How Do We Address Future Challenges" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster focuses on the development and future of Cultural Resource Protection and Management before, during, and after wildfires. As the number of fires and acres burned continue to increase each year cultural resources are at critical risk of being damaged and destroyed....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Brother.

There are only a few recognized experts on California Native American basketry and their informed opinions establish the current state of knowledge. It takes years of experience under the guidance of a knowledgeable mentor and examination of hundreds of baskets to develop such expertise. While analysis by the few experts may be quantitative, scientific, and exacting, designation of a basket’s ethnic identification continues to be subjective. In some instances, authors cite little but their own...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dale Croes. Ed Carriere.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ed Carriere and I have spent the last four years doing what is often called experimental archaeology, replicating 2,000 year old baskets from the Biderbost wet/waterlogged archaeological site east of Seattle, Washington and reporting this in our new book: Re-awakening Ancient Salish Sea Basketry. After pondering what and why we were doing this, Ed as a...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Robert Bischoff.

This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional analyses of projectile points often use visual identification, the presence or absence of discrete characteristics, or linear measurements to classify points into distinct types. Geometric morphometrics provides additional tools for analyzing, visualizing, and comparing projectile point morphology. In this study, I compare the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renata Araujo. Mercedes Okumura. Astolfo Araujo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation contemplates the application of a method of analysis for the study of artifact shape named geometric morphometrics (GM). GM is a quantitative method originated in the biological sciences with a large application in evolutionary biology for the analysis of organismal form. Evolutionary archaeologists have been employing this approach to...