One Thing Leads to Another: Causal Triggering among Archaeological Events

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A causal connection between archaeological events is frequently little more than a convenient assumption. The repeated occupation of a site, the occurrence in time and space of a ceramic ware, or the phases of settlement construction are all assumed to reflect some causal sequence, but it is far from clear how we should detect and quantify such causation. Without direct evidence of causation, it is difficult to argue for ancestor-descendant relationships, compromising our ability to make evolutionary inferences. This paper extends self-exciting point process models for estimating causal dependencies between events in space and time. We argue that ancestor-descendant relationships are more plausible when we can demonstrate spatio-temporal statistical dependence between events. We explore this problem using a large radiocarbon database from North America to estimate the date of first human colonization.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26112