Showing papers by "Stephen Shennan published in 2011"

Descent with modification and the archaeological record

Abstract: Recent years have seen major advances in our understanding of the way in which cultural transmission takes place and the factors that affect it. The theoretical foundations of those advances have been built by postulating the existence of a variety of different processes and deriving their consequences mathematically or by simulation. The operation of these processes in the real world can be studied through experiment and naturalistic observation. In contrast, archaeologists have an ‘inverse problem’. For them the object of study is the residues of different behaviours represented by the archaeological record and the problem is to infer the microscale processes that produced them, a vital task for cultural evolution since this is the only direct record of past cultural patterns. The situation is analogous to that faced by population geneticists scanning large number of genes and looking for evidence of selection as opposed to drift, but more complicated for many reasons, not least the enormous variety of different forces that affect cultural transmission. This paper reviews the progress that has been made in inferring processes from patterns and the role of demography in those processes, together with the problems that have arisen.

Property and wealth inequality as cultural niche construction

Abstract: In contrast to other approaches, evolutionary perspectives on understanding the power and wealth inequalities in human societies view wealth and power not as ends in themselves but as proximate goals that contribute to the ultimate Darwinian goal of achieving reproductive success. The most successful means of achieving it in specific times and places depend on local conditions and these have changed in the course of human history, to such an extent that strategies focused on the maintenance and increase of wealth can even be more successful in reproductive terms than strategies directed at maximizing reproductive success in the short term. This paper argues that a major factor leading to such changes is a shift in the nature of inter-generational wealth transfers from relatively intangible to material property resources and the opportunities these provided for massively increased inequality. This shift can be seen as a process of niche construction related to the increasing importance of fixed and defensible resources in many societies after the end of the last Ice Age. It is suggested that, despite problems of inference, the evidence of the archaeological record can be used to throw light on these processes in specific places and times.

Population-level neutral model already explains linguistic patterns

Abstract: In customizing the neutral model for language transmission, Reali & Griffiths [[1][1]] have added a new, ‘Bayesian’ learning interpretation to a neutral model that has been used in cultural evolution studies for some time (eg [[2][2]–[6][3]]) While Reali & Griffiths [[1][1], p 435] dismiss

Social Evolution Today

Abstract: While Gordon Childe's synthetic descriptive works of Near Eastern and European prehistory have long been overtaken, his social evolutionism remains of interest. His concept of social evolution was not dogmatically unilinear. It involved branching differentiation and diffusion and an acknowledged role for what he called 'the Darwinian formula of "variation, heredity, adaptation and selection"' in the understanding of cultural change. Moreover, unlike many later archaeological neo-evolutionists, he regarded the social evolutionary schemes of comparative anthropology as broad guiding frameworks whose implications were to be tested by archaeology, rather than as providing a series of stages into which the archaeological material was to be slotted. Those approaches have mostly lost their credibility in archaeology in the last 20 years, leaving much of the discipline without a very clear agenda, despite the continuing importance of the issues that the evolutionists were trying to address. This paper argues that developments in evolu- tionary anthropology and institutional economics over the last 25 years provide a basis for an updated and theoretically powerful approach to characterising social evolution and explaining the patterns identified in terms of well-founded micro-scale processes which would not be out of keeping with Childe's own perspective.

An evolutionary perspective on the goals of archaeology

Abstract: This collection of original articles compares various key archaeological topics—agency, violence, social groups, diffusion—from evolutionary and ...