Are Changes in Rates of Technological Change Robust to Error? A Paired Bayesian and Simulation Approach to Assessing the Pleistocene Record

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Observed changes in rates of technological change play important roles in many models seeking to explain or identify the greater adaptability of some hominins over others, adaptation to changing environments, and many other processes. We quantify how robust detection of a shift in the rate of technological change is to error in measuring technological variation, uncertainty about site age, and the overrepresentation of recent sites. The approach taken here is to simulate new archaeological records based on parameters derived from a global sample. For each simulated record we then derive posterior estimates for the date of a shift in the rate of technological change, and the rates of change before and after that date. We find that even when raw data suggest a shift in the rate of change within a certain time period, when we take into account various biases inherent in the archaeological record, this decreases substantially our certainty about when a shift may have occurred, and its magnitude. The results highlight some issues with claims of greater observed rates of technological change in the recent record, relative to the Early and Middle Pleistocene. Such claims should more directly assess whether they are robust to various biases.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36626.0