Evolutionary Archaeologies: New Approaches, Methods, and Empirical Sufficiency
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Over the past decade, methodological advances and the expansion of the application of evolutionary frameworks have led to critical insights into a host of anthropological and archaeological problems. Enduring topics in evolutionary archaeology such as cultural transmission and population dynamics are benefiting from these new methodologies. Concurrently, expanding evolutionary models seek to explain specific human interactions and historic processes through the study of material culture. The papers in this symposium display the breadth of current archaeological research that engages with a range of evolutionary models, from the influence of cognitive biases in social learning and the impacts of population dynamics on cultural diversity to how optimal foraging and signaling models can help archaeologists tease apart the historical dynamics behind social practices. Our papers demonstrate how different evolutionary models are aiding archaeologists in teasing apart the dynamics behind assemblages in diverse contexts, ranging from the Classic Maya to enslaved plantation workers.
Other Keywords
Slavery •
Ritual •
Seriation •
Markets •
Cultural Evolution •
Labrets •
Population Structure •
Consumption •
Cultural Transmission •
Agent-Based Modeling
Geographic Keywords
Caribbean •
Mesoamerica •
Yukon Territory (State / Territory) •
Alaska (State / Territory) •
North America (Continent) •
AFRICA •
North America - NW Coast/Alaska •
North America - Northeast •
North America - Southeast
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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Chitons and Clams, Cash and Carry: an archaeological exploration of the impact of enslaved children’s foraging strategies on 18th-century enslaved households in Jamaica (2016)
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Attempts at understanding the economic and social strategies used by enslaved people in the early modern Atlantic World require sophisticated models of human interaction, models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. Here Optimal Foraging Theory provides the framework for identifying the fishing and foraging activities of enslaved children and adults laboring at the Stewart Castle Estate, an 18th-century Jamaican...
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Credibility Enhancing Displays and the Changing Expression of Coast Salish Social Commitments (2016)
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Recent developments in evolutionary psychology expanding on signalling theory provide key insights to the connections between expressing social commitments and resource rights. Credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) are a means to convince individuals of commitment to belief systems and can link costly acts or extravagant displays to social success. In the Salish Sea the transition from labrets to cranial modification from 3200-1000 BP has often been framed in terms reflecting a shift from...
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Diversity and Divergence of Classic Maya Ritual Traditions: A Lexical Perspective on Within-Group Cultural Variation (2016)
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To study the Classic Maya is to at once recognize the shared material representations and practices that give coherence to this cultural category as a unit of analysis, as well as to critically examine the diversity and idiosyncrasy of specific cultural traits. Maya hieroglyphic writing, in particular the tradition of inscribing texts and images on carved stone monuments, offers evidence for widespread and mutually intelligible cultural practices that were neither unchanging nor uniform in their...
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Evolutionary Archaeology and the Anthropocene (2016)
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Recently, the Anthropocene has challenged us to reflect on the era we live in and about the very terms in which we can frame its definition. As a geological era, the Anthropocene seems to be the field of geologists, paleontologists and biologists. However, now that the impact of Homo sapiens on the planet became focus of preoccupation, an excellent opportunity has arisen to rethink the relationship H. sapiens - nature from the viewpoint of other disciplines. As controversy, the Anthropocene can...
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How can evolutionary models and archaeological evidence help us understand change in the household economies of slave villages on Nevis and Kitts? (2016)
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Early-modern slave village sites in the eastern Caribbean are littered with both locally-made "Afro-Caribbean" and imported European ceramics. Archaeologists have focused on the former as an expression of identity, while ignoring copious variation in time and space in both classes of ceramics and the causal mechanisms that might be responsible for it. This paper embeds evolutionary models of costly signaling and markets in a larger multi-level selection framework to offer a tentative explanation...
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Local extinctions and regional cultural diversification in time-averaged assemblages (2016)
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Modern human behavior, including regional cultural differentiation, has traditionally been characterized as a relatively recent phenomenon despite evidence of modernity before 50,000 years ago from the Paleolithic record of Africa. Researchers interested in how demography might improve our interpretation of the archaeological record have shown that the rate of local group extinctions can affect neutral cultural diversity and the rate at which copy errors accumulate in structured populations....
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Measuring Cultural Relatedness Using Multiple Seriation Ordering Algorithms (2016)
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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...
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Reading the chisel’s chippings: Changing religious attitudes about death and eighteenth-century New England gravestones (2016)
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The eighteenth century was a dynamic period of religious change, particularly in New England, as the Calvinistic influence of the Puritan settlers waned and new denominations emerged. This was also a time of rapidly changing funerary ritual, when the inscriptions on grave markers shifted from emphases on marking the remains of the decedent to commemorating them, and gravestone motifs became more diverse. This study examines the ways that religious attitudes towards death change, using a database...