Cultural Macroevolution in the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene of Eastern Siberia and Western North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Geneticists have used phylogenetic analyses to model population movements associated with emergence and movements of distinct populations in northeast Siberia and the Americas. However, archaeologists have rarely taken advantage of this approach to examine the emergence and radiation of cultural traditions in these regions. In this paper, we draw on a cultural macroevolutionary perspective to model long-term evolutionary processes across Siberia and western North America during the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene. More specifically, we rely upon multiple phylogenetic approaches to model cultural evolutionary processes related to lithic technological systems associated with hunter-gatherer-fisher groups over the long term in these regions. We test a number of long-standing hypotheses concerning evolution and spread of widely recognized technological traditions identified by archaeologists as: Dyuktai/Denali, Nenana/Berelekh, Western-Stemmed, Old Cordilleran, Nesikep, Clovis/Folsom/Northern Paleo-Indian, Plains/Northern/Shield Archaic, Arctic Small Tool, and Thule cultural complexes. We apply a Bayesian phylogenetics approach to a dataset representing thousands of years of cultural evolution and change, allowing us to examine the probability of different phylogenetic relationships while substantially avoiding issues of underdetermination. Thus, we offer insights into a range of discussions associated with peopling of the Americas and subsequent cultural evolutionary process.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38187.0