Borrowing and Inheritance: Testing Cultural Transmission Hypotheses in the Bridge River Housepit Village

Summary

Cultural transmission is an evolutionary process that involves the transfer of information between people that over time can lead to the establishment of cultural traditions. This approach permits development of hypotheses regarding the cultural evolutionary process in a variety of contexts. In this paper we examine cultural transmission between generations by analyzing the effects of vertical and horizontal inheritance using archaeological data from the Bridge River housepit village. The Bridge River site offers a unique opportunity to examine cultural inheritance across generations spanning the past 2000 years. In this paper, we present the results of a phylogenetic study of projectile points drawn from the deeply stratified floor sequence of Housepit 54 at Bridge River. This permits us to assess variability in cultural inheritance between the many floors and potentially also between housepits.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Complex Fisher-Foragers of the Interior Pacific Northwest: The Housepit 54 Project at Bridge River, British Columbia

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 13231