Showing papers by "Stephen Shennan published in 2000"

Population, Culture History, and the Dynamics of Culture Change

Abstract: If archaeology is to succeed in explaining culture change, it must view the archaeological record from the perspective of cultural “descent with modification,” in so doing returning to many of the issues addressed by the culture‐history agenda rejected 30–40 years ago. This involves a consideration of the processes affecting cultural transmission. Many of these are strongly affected by the history of the biological populations in which cultural transmission occurs. It can be shown that prehistoric populations fluctuated much more than used to be thought and that these fluctuations can be hard to detect archaeologically. They can often be associated with cultural changes, and, in fact, the size of populations affects the nature of cultural processes in a variety of ways. These general points are illustrated with reference to a case study from the circum‐Alpine Neolithic, where dendrochronology provides high‐resolution dating.

Processes of culture change in prehistory: a case study from the European Neolithic

Abstract: graphic data rather than archaeological evidence (e.g. Kirch & Green 1987; Durham 1992; Welsch et al. 1992; Mace & Pagel 1994; Moore 1994a,b; Moore & Romney 1994; Guglielmino et al. 1995; Holden & Mace 1999). How can we assess the relative contribution of phylogenesis and ethnogenesis to the patterns in the archaeological record? In this chapter, we argue that this archaeological problem is related to problems that have been successfully confronted by biologists, linguists and stemmatists. We then present a case study, in which we use a technique that was developed to tackle the aforementioned biological problem to assess the roles of phylogenesis and ethnogenesis in producing the patterns of variation in a group of pottery assemblages from the Central European Neolithic. Lastly, we consider the implications of our findings for current archaeological approaches to evidence for culture change.