Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology

Anna Marie Prentiss Editor

Handbook of

Evolutionary

Research in

Archaeology

Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology

Anna Marie Prentiss

Editor

Handbook of Evolutionary

Research in Archaeology

123

Editor

Anna Marie Prentiss

Department of Anthropology

University of Montana

Missoula, MT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-11116-8 ISBN 978-3-030-11117-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11117-5

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

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Acknowledgements

The Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology evolved from a series of discussions between

the editor (Anna Prentiss) and the executive editor for Archaeology and Anthropology at Springer

(Teresa Krauss). After meetings in Kyoto, Japan, and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, we

agreed that this would be a productive effort, and the project was initiated. Teresa has subsequently

played a significant role in developing the vision for this book and guiding it through its various stages

including designing specific content, peer review, final submissions, and book production.

I am grateful for all the work by our international group of contributors including (in approximate

order by chapter) Matt Walsh (National Museum of Denmark), Felix Riede (Aarhus University, Den￾mark), Sean O’Neal (Aarhus University, Denmark), Nathan Goodale (Hamilton College, USA), Anne

Kandler (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany), Enrico Crema (University

of Cambridge, England), Cheyenne Laue (University of Montana, USA), Alden Wright (University

of Montana, USA), Larissa Mendoza Straffon (Leiden University, the Netherlands), Erik Gjesfjeld

(University of Cambridge, England), Peter Jordan (University of Groningen, the Netherlands), Charles

Spencer (American Museum of Natural History, USA), Lisa Nagaoka (University of North Texas,

USA), Kristen Gremillion (The Ohio State University, USA), Colin Quinn (Hamilton College, USA),

Nicole Herzog (Boise State University, USA), Cedric Puleston (University of California, Davis,

USA), Bruce Winterhalder (University of California, Davis, USA), Marc Abramiuk (California State

University Channel Islands, USA), and Duilio Garofoli (University of Tübingen, Germany). Many

of these scholars are early to mid-career, and I think this bodes extremely well for the future of

evolutionary research in archaeology.

I am also very grateful to our two dedicated peer reviewers for the diligence in reading this lengthy

collection and for their excellent and useful comments. Their work makes a big difference to the

quality of the contents of this book.

I thank the University of Montana for awarding me with a year-long sabbatical that opened the

time to write chapters and edit much of the collection. The sabbatical was partially funded by

a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant RZ-230366-1). Any views,

findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the chapters authored by me in this book

do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I also thank

the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, England, (and

especially Cyprian Broodbank) for providing me with a visiting scholar position during the sabbatical

that facilitated writing time and offered a very stimulating academic environment within which to

work. I thank (in no particular order) Matt Walsh, Cheyenne Laue, Enrico Crema, Erik Gjesfjeld, Sean

O’Neal, Charles Spencer, Bruce Winterhalder, Nathan Goodale, Jim Chatters, Tom Foor, and Ian Kuijt

for many stimulating conversations in person and over email. Special thanks to Tanja Hoffman and

Susanne Hakenbeck for support, friendship, and good conversations during my time in Cambridge.

v

vi Acknowledgements

Finally, I thank my family for their unwavering support and endless patience, while I travelled

around the world developing this project (among other things) and, subsequently, spent long hours

hidden away getting some writing done!

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Acknowledgements vii

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Contents

1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 1

Anna Marie Prentiss

Part I Microevolution

2 Introduction to Cultural Microevolutionary Research in Anthropology

and Archaeology ................................................................................ 25

Matthew J. Walsh, Anna Marie Prentiss, and Felix Riede

3 Cultural Transmission and Innovation in Archaeology .................................... 49

Matthew J. Walsh, Felix Riede, and Sean O’Neill

4 Natural Selection, Material Culture, and Archaeology .................................... 71

Nathan Goodale

5 Analysing Cultural Frequency Data: Neutral Theory and Beyond ....................... 83

Anne Kandler and Enrico R. Crema

Part II Macroevolution

6 Cultural Macroevolution ...................................................................... 111

Anna Marie Prentiss and Cheyenne L. Laue

7 Landscape Revolutions for Cultural Evolution: Integrating Advanced Fitness

Landscapes into the Study of Cultural Change ............................................. 127

Cheyenne L. Laue and Alden H. Wright

8 The Uses of Cultural Phylogenetics in Archaeology ........................................ 149

Larissa Mendoza Straffon

9 Contributions of Bayesian Phylogenetics to Exploring Patterns

of Macroevolution in Archaeological Data................................................... 161

Erik Gjesfjeld and Peter Jordan

10 Cultural Macroevolution and Social Change ................................................ 183

Charles S. Spencer

ix

x Contents

Part III Human Ecology

11 Human Ecology ................................................................................. 217

Anna Marie Prentiss

12 Human Behavioral Ecology and Zooarchaeology........................................... 231

Lisa Nagaoka

13 Human Behavioral Ecology and Plant Resources in Archaeological Research.......... 255

Kristen J. Gremillion

14 Costly Signaling Theory in Archaeology ..................................................... 275

Colin P. Quinn

15 Human Behavioral Ecology and Technological Decision-Making......................... 295

Nicole M. Herzog and Nathan Goodale

16 Demography, Environment, and Human Behavior ......................................... 311

Cedric Puleston and Bruce Winterhalder

17 Niche Construction Theory and Human Biocultural Evolution........................... 337

Felix Riede

Part IV Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology

18 A Brief Overview of Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology ................................ 361

Marc A. Abramiuk

19 Embodied Cognition and the Archaeology of Mind: A Radical Reassessment .......... 379

Duilio Garofoli

20 Evolution and the Origins of Visual Art: An Archaeological Perspective ................ 407

Larissa Mendoza Straffon

Index ................................................................................................... 437

Contributors

Marc A. Abramiuk Anthropology Program, California State University Channel Islands,

Camarillo, CA, USA

Enrico R. Crema Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Duilio Garofoli Cognitive Archaeology Unit, Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Eberhard Karls

University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

Research Center “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans” of the Heidelberg Academy

of Sciences and Humanities, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

Erik Gjesfjeld Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Nathan Goodale Anthropology Department, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA

Kristen J. Gremillion Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH,

USA

Nicole M. Herzog Department of Anthropology, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

Peter Jordan Faculty of the Arts, Arctic and Antarctic Studies, University of Groningen, Groningen,

The Netherlands

Anne Kandler Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for

Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Cheyenne L. Laue Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

Lisa Nagaoka Department of Geography and the Environment, University of North Texas, Denton,

TX, USA

Sean O’Neill Arctic Research Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Anna Marie Prentiss Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

Cedric Puleston Department of Anthropology (Evolutionary Wing), University of California, Davis,

Davis, CA, USA

Colin P. Quinn Anthropology Department, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA

Felix Riede Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies/Centre for Environmental Humanities,

BIOCHANGE Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World, Aarhus University, Aarhus,

Denmark

xi

xii Contributors

Charles S. Spencer Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York,

NY, USA

Larissa Mendoza Straffon Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Matthew J. Walsh Environmental Archaeology and Materials Science, National Museum of

Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

Bruce Winterhalder Department of Anthropology (Evolutionary Wing), University of California,

Davis, Davis, CA, USA

Alden H. Wright Department of Computing Science, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

Chapter 1

Introduction

Anna Marie Prentiss

Introduction

Evolutionary archaeology has developed from a marginal discussion to a mainstream focus in modern

archaeology. Archaeologists have become widely aware that the rigorous procedures developed in

the guise of evolutionary research can provide significant insight into a host of phenomena including

technological change, migration, subsistence adaptation, demography, sociality, and cognition on long

and short scales (Lycett 2015). This handbook is designed as a guide to current research trends,

insights, and contributions of evolutionary research in archaeology. The theoretical focus in all

chapters is Darwinian evolution process inclusive of perspectives broadly derived from the modern

evolutionary synthesis (Huxley 1942) and the emerging extended evolutionary synthesis (Laland et

al. 2015). Contributions to the book are not about neoevolution and other social science paradigms

more influenced by the writing of Spencer (1857; e.g. Harris (1979); White (1959)). Given the focus

on archaeology, the book also excludes specific coverage of evolutionary psychology though issues

of cultural transmission and cognitive archaeology at times take us into psychological realms. Finally,

this is not specifically a book about paleoanthropology though the models of evolutionary archaeology,

human ecology, and evolutionary cognitive archaeology offer a wide range of contributions to our

understanding of human bio-cultural evolution.

Evolutionary research in archaeology is now a vast endeavor driven by scholars throughout the

globe integrating theoretical concepts spanning evolutionary biology to the various cultural sciences

(Mesoudi 2011; Mesoudi et al. 2006). The diversity of evolutionary research in archaeology thus

poses a significant challenge for explicating its contributions within a single book. I accomplish

this by drawing organizational concepts from the work of Niles Eldredge (1985), who, in his book,

Unfinished Synthesis, argued that evolutionary process can be understood within dual genealogical

and ecological frameworks, both hierarchically structured and implicating evolutionary and ecological

process on multiple scales. Entities within the genealogical or evolutionary hierarchy span genes to

species to monophyletic taxa implicating processes of evolution acting across time measured on scales

of single to thousands of generations or, put differently, as microevolution and macroevolution. It is,

thus, within the genealogical hierarchy that we monitor evolutionary change through time. However,

Eldredge argues that the process of evolution cannot unfold without activity in the adjoining ecological

hierarchy as it is here, with its organisms, avatars, and ecosystems, that energy is exchanged,

A. M. Prentiss ()

Department of Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

e-mail: anna.prentiss@umontana.edu

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

A. M. Prentiss (ed.), Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11117-5_1

1

2 A. M. Prentiss

reproduction accomplished, and the process of natural selection actually played out. Thus, the effects

of economic, social, and reproductive decision-making among living entities in their ecological

surroundings are essential to understanding the wider evolutionary process.

Cultural evolution can also be understood within evolutionary and ecological frameworks.

Evolutionary anthropologists established the cultural evolution can be understood to act as an

inheritance system operating in parallel to biological inheritance (Boyd and Richerson 1985). This

dual inheritance framework permits us to recognize a cultural microevolutionary process with a wide

array of potential impacts on the development of cultural concepts and their subsequent evolution

over shorter and longer time spans. In the shorter term, cultural inheritance is recognized as a

complex process of transmission by imitation, teaching, and experimentation regarding cultural

characters that vary with the accumulation of errors, modifications, and innovations. Over longer

or macroevolutionary spans, cultural evolution can be understood as a product of accumulated

microevolution (O’Brien and Lyman 2000), a result punctuated change on higher integrated scales

(Prentiss et al. 2009), or the effect of more complex neutral and nearly neutral processes (Kandler and

Crema, this volume; Kandler and Shennan 2013; Laue and Wright, this volume). Boyd and Richerson

(1992a, b) recognize that cultural inheritance affects ecological (and reproductive) decision-making.

Simultaneously, ecological/reproductive decisions have long- and short-term impacts on the per￾sistence of human populations and their associated cultural traditions (Richerson and Boyd 2005).

Consequently it is highly appropriate that we study human ecology within evolutionary frameworks.

Finally, given the central importance of human cognition to short- and long-term cultural evolutionary

process (Abramiuk 2012), evolutionary cognitive research remains a critical concern to an integrated

evolutionary approach to archaeology.

The Handbook of Evolutionary Research in Archaeology is thus organized around four major

themes: cultural microevolution, cultural macroevolution, human ecology, and evolutionary cognitive

archaeology. In the following, Chap. 1 introduces each theme and provides a short history of research

and a review of associated critical theoretical and methodological milestones. I close with a short

review of book contents by subject matter and author.

Research Themes

Cultural Microevolution

Our understanding of evolutionary process on any scale depends upon our knowledge of microevo￾lutionary process as it is here that change occurs and variants persist on an intergenerational

basis. The most widely influential model of microevolution derives from the Darwinian synthesis

of the mid-twentieth century in which Darwin’s (1859) naturalism was combined with genetics

(Huxley 1942). Synthetic Darwinism embodied a number of distinct conclusions regarding the

structure of the evolutionary process. These included an emphasis on population thinking such

that change was reflected in changes in character frequencies. Given this assumption, species were

not “real” in an empirical sense (Brooks 2011). Evolutionary process was understood to be an

undirected process (thus, non-Lamarckian) that combined exclusively genetic inheritance with sorting

mechanisms consisting of natural selection and drift. Put differently, inheritance was viewed as

logically independent or “blind” to the effects of selection or drift processes. Evolution was thus

assumed to be a gradual process by which organisms with high fitness would outcompete those with

lower fitness within an ecological context. This could be visualized as exclusive occupancy of optimal

fitness space held as long as not outcompeted by another variant (Brooks 2011).

Anthropologists have been interested in cultural evolution since the era of the social Darwinists

(Morgan 1877; Spencer 1857; Tylor 1871). However, it was not until the 1960s that anthropologists

1 Introduction 3

and evolutionary biologists took their first forays into serious consideration of cultural evolution from

a Darwinian standpoint. An important early paper was Campbell’s (1965) “Variation and Selective

Retention in Sociocultural Systems.” Campbell made four critical arguments that (1) sociocultural

evolution is a process of descent with modification and can thus be examined from a Darwinian

perspective; (2) evolution is a genetic and cultural process; (3) natural selection is the ultimate force

in cultural and biological evolution; and (4) natural selection has direct impacts on cultural variants.

As noted by Richerson and Boyd (2000), these arguments were highly influential and shortly led to

a number of important papers. Collectively these contributions suggested that it would be possible

to use formal models from evolutionary biology to explore nuances of cultural evolutionary process,

particularly cultural transmission (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1973, 1981; Ruyle 1973), and if so,

then scholars would also be able to model culture as a fitness-enhancing system (Durham 1976).

Durham (1976) introduced the concept of cultural selection, suggesting that if cultural variants offered

benefits to biological fitness, then selective retention of those traits might be best understood within the

synthetic Darwinian framework. Durham (1976, p. 115) called this process “coevolution” and pointed

to cultural evolution as a logically separate but complimentary process to biological evolution.

Lumsden and Wilson (1981) took gene-culture coevolution a step further in their explication of

its linkages to sociobiological process. Adherents to sociobiology had argued that behavior could be

explained as optimal choices for enhancing fitness in particular settings (Krebs and Davies 1981;

Wilson 1975). Critiques of this position focused on the nature of cultural behavior as not inherited

biologically and thus inappropriate for sociobiological modeling. But Alexander (1979) and Irons

(1979) argued that even cultural behavior could be viewed as phenotypic plasticity and thus still

fitness enhancing and subject to effects of selection. Yet, this argument still suffered from its inability

to adequately explain the diversity of culture using fitness optimality arguments. Lumsden and Wilson

(1981, pp. 343–344) argued that while traditional sociobiology could not adequately account for

transitional relationships between genes and cultures, coevolution could make that jump via what they

called epigenesis or the rules for development of behavior as proscribed by “gene ensembles inherited

by single organisms.” Persistence of cultural variants within this framework was thus substantially

dependent upon genetic fitness resulting from behavior stimulated by acceptance of those variants.

Boyd and Richerson (1985) note that a wide variety of scholars made similar arguments regarding

relationships between genes and culture during this period (e.g., Alexander 1979; Baldwin and

Baldwin 1981; Boehm 1978; Harris 1979; Plotkin and Odling-Smee 1981) that ultimately amounted

to four substantially sociobiological hypotheses: (1) the “pure environment” hypothesis asserts that

different behaviors among different groups is the result of optimal decision-making by individuals as

structured by the inherited genetic traits and not culture (cf. Alexander 1979); (2) the environment

plus culture hypothesis states that inherited cultural variants can have fitness-enhancing effects along

with optimal behavior as explicated under the pure environment hypothesis (cf. Durham 1978, 1979);

(3) the pure genes hypothesis holds at its ultimate extreme that cultural differences between human

populations are best explained by genetic differentiation (cf. Lumsden and Wilson 1981); and (4) the

genes plus culture hypothesis asserts that while cultural inheritance is an important force, its impact

is generally short term such that decisions to accept or reject particular cultural variants are still most

strongly impacted by population genetics (cf. Lumsden and Wilson 1981). Boyd and Richerson (1985,

pp. 170–171) point out that these hypotheses are important in that they provide a biologically oriented

standard by which other models of cultural evolution must be compared. However, they argue that

there is good reason to believe that none are correct given that the impacts of human decision-making

outside of culturally inherited tools to solve complex problems are probably quite minimal and there

are many examples of cultural traditions persisting despite environmental change.

Boyd and Richerson’s (1985) and Richerson and Boyd’s (2005) highly influential dual inheritance

theory was a critical outcome of the sociobiology and gene-culture coevolution discussions in

the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dual inheritance theory was developed as set of formal models

specifying culture as information that was acquired through either imitation or teaching/learning.

4 A. M. Prentiss

Boyd and Richerson sought to overcome challenges of the sociobiological models as well as contra￾sociobiological perspectives of other anthropologists, for example, Sahlins (1976) who asserted that

genetics and adaptation to environmental contexts could be ignored in theorizing culture and culture

change. The outcome was recognition of culture as an inheritance system that included explicit

mechanisms by which diversity was introduced over time leading to the possibility of divergent

cultural traditions. Boyd and Richerson developed explicit models that included guided variation

or the effects of learning from a teacher and bias mechanisms that specified the means by which

individuals might preferentially favor one cultural variant over another. The latter included direct

bias or the results of evaluations of options, frequency-dependent bias or the effects of chooses that

which is most common or rare within a social network, and, finally, indirect biases, those that derive

from modeling on an index trait (e.g., prestige) that leads to acceptance of additional traits without

question. Boyd and Richerson’s work firmly established the study of cultural transmission in the

social and biological sciences leading to a wide variety of new studies in and out of archaeology (e.g.,

Bettinger and Eerkens 1999; Eerkens and Lipo 2007; Kandler and Crema, this volume; McElreath

et al. 2003; O’Brien 2008; Richerson et al. 2001; Soltis et al. 1995; Stark et al. 2008; Walsh et al.

Chaps. 2 and 3, this volume). Theories of cultural transmission were also an important antecedent

to the so-called cultural virus theory, which borrowed equally from Dawkins’ (1976) concept of the

selfish gene imagining cultural entities (“memes”) engaging much like genes in strategies to self￾replicate (Blackmore 1999; Cullen 1996). Despite the importance of cultural transmission theory to

early evolutionary anthropologists, it was curiously unimportant in early evolutionary archaeology.

During the 1970s and through the 1980s, Robert Dunnell published a series of papers promoting

what eventually became known as evolutionary archaeology. Dunnell (1980) offered a number of cri￾tiques of archaeological (and by extension, anthropological) theory focusing in particular on problems

of essentialism and uses of “common sense” in anthropological interpretation. Dunnell’s fundamental

concern was that in pursuit of the goals of processual archaeology that involved interpretation of sites

in order to reconstruct the functioning of cultural systems, scholars effectively reified the present

thus biasing any hope of understanding change. Further, they introduced explanatory bias clouded

by ethnocentric assumptions by relying implicitly on so-called common sense arguments derived

from Western culture. To Dunnell, this left archaeologists in the position of seeking explanations

for change between invalid cultural constructions without reference to defensible theoretical concepts.

Interestingly, the post-processual theorists of the 1980s posed some of the same critiques but answered

them with a push to move away from science toward Marxian-inspired interpretivist archaeology

(Hodder 1985; Shanks and Tilley 1987). Dunnell took the opposite tact promoting an empirically

based archaeology that relied heavily on the synthetic evolutionary model. Dunnell’s (1980, 1982,

1989) conception of an evolutionary archaeology aligned archaeology with paleontology in the sense

that archaeologists cannot direct monitor cultural change at the level of information as proposed,

for example, by Boyd and Richerson just as paleontologists could not study evolution as change

in gene frequencies. Rather, archaeologists were faced with variation in material culture (artifacts

and features), which evidently changed over time but not in the same way as biological species.

Indeed, this issue had been a long-standing concern to archaeologists effectively preventing culture

history era scholars from adopting synthetic Darwinism at much earlier dates (e.g., Brew 1946; Willey

1966). The study of artifacts with a particular focus on classification became a central concern to early

evolutionary archaeology (e.g., Dunnell 1989, 1995; Ramenofsky and Steffen 1998), and this along

with a concern for change over extremely long time spans helps to explain its limited engagement

with cultural transmission theory (Cochrane 2009).

To create a truly Darwinian scientific archaeology, Dunnell argued that artifacts represent the hard

parts of the human phenotype much like fossils and that change was not qualitative but quantitative

as characters were added and replaced (Dunnell 1989). If artifacts reflected the evolution of the

human phenotype, then it positioned archaeology as another evolutionary science (Goodale et al. this

volume). Next, Dunnell needed a way to understand the evolutionary process from a material cultural