Cultural Transmission (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Taylor. Juan Bautista Belardi.

This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The introduction of domestic horses following Spanish colonization transformed Indigenous societies across the grasslands of Argentina, leading to the emergence of specialized horse cultures across the Southern Cone. However, the relatively late establishment of...

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 Yamile Lira-Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "Los Rituales del Juego de Pelota en la Costa del Golfo / Ballgame Rituals in the Gulf Lowlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El juego de pelota es un tema que ha llamado la atención a numerosos investigadores, algunos se han centrado en el estudio arquitectónico, otros desarrollan enfoques iconográficos o propuestas de rituales basados en evidencias como en el Tajín. En otros lugares, solo se distinguen las...

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 Loren Davis. Masami Izuho. Alexander Nyers. Fumie Iizuka. David Madsen.

This is an abstract from the "The Global “Impact” of Projectile Technologies: Updating Methods and Regional Overviews of the Invention and Transmission of the Spear-Thrower and the Bow and Arrow" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While paleogenetic studies indicate that the majority of the genomic heredity of indigenous peoples of the Americas can be traced to late Pleistocene human populations in far eastern Asia, we do not yet understand whether a...

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 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ed Carriere, Suquamish Elder and Master Basketmaker and I published on how ancient Salish Sea basketry styles statistically linked through 4,000+ years in style to the basketry Ed learned from his Great Grandmother Julia Jacobs (born 1874) who raised him from infancy. Ed helped me analyze 2,000-year-old wet archaeological basketry from his traditional...

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The area stretching from the Usumacinta River basin in western Guatemala into the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, hosted key centers of Classic Maya political and cultural life (ca. 250–850 CE). Scribes and sculptors active across the region produced hundreds of stone monuments inscribed with texts in a common hieroglyphic script. Yet little is known about how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Bankston.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent scholarship has recognized that the foundational elements of the Ancestral Puebloan culture observed during the height of the Chacoan Phenomenon first began to appear during the Basketmaker III time period (AD 450-750), with the construction of kivas, the emergence of vast trade networks, and population aggregation. However, one interesting aspect of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick. Liying Wang.

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. Both neutral drift and selection cause the frequencies of artefact types in a archaeological sequences to vary over time. Discriminating between these two processes, based on a time series of artefacts from a site or region, if often important for answering archaeological questions. However,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terance Winemiller. Virginia Ochoa-Winemiller.

This paper discusses the spatial, typological, and stylistic analyses of obsidian and ceramic artifacts recovered from El Chichicaste and Dos Quebradas, two prehistoric sites in the department of Olancho, Eastern Honduras. Using geographic information systems and 3D laser scanning technology, analyses revealed the extent of trade relationships that these two ancient communities maintained with sites in Mesoamerica and their southern neighbors in Central America. We argue that integration of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thaddeus Bissett.

This is an abstract from the "*SE Big Data and Bigger Questions: Papers in Honor of David G. Anderson" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the myriad contributions David Anderson has made to American archaeology are his multiple collaborations with researchers using GIS (including myself) to extract new and useful data from multiscalar and multitemporal spatial datasets. As a graduate student of his, I learned that new and valuable information...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raven Garvey.

This is an abstract from the "Old Technology, New Methodology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To test hypothesized effects of cultural transmission on material cultural evolution, archaeologists primarily use the coefficient of variation (CV). Interpretation of archaeological CVs is necessarily comparative, and foundational papers have assessed variation across broad geographic regions, and relative to either theoretically-derived threshold CVs or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alexander Bentley.

This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kinship is an important but often under-researched aspect of the rise of complex societies. Whereas early agricultural communities in Neolithic Europe and East Asia were patrilineal and patrilocal, the nature and impact of prehistoric kinship systems in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) is becoming better...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Sluka.

A pilot study of pile carpet variation and error is carried out on ethnographic Turkmen carpets. No such work has been previously published, and so this analysis provides basic data and conclusions on carpet variation, including type and intensity of variation, to be used as a starting point for further study of archaeologic carpet samples. Data is taken from six comparable carpets, informing on two aspects of carpet variation. The dimensions and knot densities of the carpets’ motifs are used...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levi Raskin. Jonathan Reeves. Matthew Douglass. David Braun.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Variation in lithics has been used as a mechanism to infer diachronic aspects of hominin behavior. The emergence of the Acheulean industry is considered a major milestone in the evolution of hominin cognition. This perspective is predicated on the idea that Acheulean large cutting tools (LCTs) require mental templates imposed through knapping and that LCTs...

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

The ability to transmit cultural information with high-fidelity across generations is a defining trait of modern humans. It is unclear, however, how and when this adaptation emerged in the human lineage. The earliest forms of human technology—stone artifacts—required knappers to understand raw material mechanics, as well as geometry (volume reduction, angles), and physics. Thus, it is often assumed that the spread of lithic technologies involved some degree of information transmission. However,...