Cultural Evolution in Archaeology

Summary

Models of cultural evolution aim at a process level understanding of cultural change and gene-culture coevolution. The micro level foundations of these models can be tested in the lab and field on living populations and, in favorable circumstances, with fine-grained archaeological data. Macro scale problems can only be studied by fitting models to historical and archaeological data that can resolve patterns on time scales of a century or more. Progress in two areas in particular are contributing to making this project feasible. First, improvements in dating resolution and increases in the spatial and temporal resolution of the archaeological record are making it possible to generate high quality quantitative databases that resolve the longer time scales. Second, increased computing power and improvements in statistical methods allow us to fit competing evolutionary models directly to this data.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Evolutionary theory and archaeology, Part I: Cultural transmission, cultural evolution, and evolutionary archaeology

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