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

Author(s): Lindsay Scott; Anna Marie Prentiss; Matt Walsh

Year: 2017

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.

Cite this Record

Borrowing and Inheritance: Testing Cultural Transmission Hypotheses in the Bridge River Housepit Village. Lindsay Scott, Anna Marie Prentiss, Matt Walsh. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, British Columbia. 2017 ( tDAR id: 430150)

Spatial Coverage

min long: -169.717; min lat: 42.553 ; max long: -122.607; max lat: 71.301 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 13231