Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The goal of this session to discuss the practical application of computational methods for identifying drift, selection, innovation, transmission bias, extinction, and many other evolutionary processes in the archaeological record. In recent years there have been many exciting methodological advances in applying Darwinian evolutionary concepts to answer fundamental questions about human behaviour, demography, and material culture. These innovations are applicable to a wide variety of artefact types, such as ceramics, lithics, and others. However, much of this cutting-edge work remains esoteric because of the technical complexity of extending these new approaches beyond their initial publication. This has limited the scope of potential reuse of these methods, and their potential (and limitations) has yet to be fully explored. The priority for this session is to show how these methods are broadly accessible to any archaeologist who is curious about evolutionary methods in archaeology. Papers in this session will go ‘behind the scenes’ of these analyses to show the practical details of how the analyses are done, and how the results can be interpreted. Papers will be accompanied by online compendia provided as a resource for further ‘hands-on’ study after the session.