Cladistics (Archaeology)

Tool design is a cultural trait—a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss, or partial alteration. Artifacts and other components of the archaeological record serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity in defining and measuring whatever it is that is being transmitted. Our interest here is in tool design, and we illustrate how to create analytical units that allow us to map tool-design space and to begin to understand how that space was used at different points in time. We first introduce the concept of fitness landscape and impose a model of cultural learning over it, then turn to four methods that are useful for the analysis of design space: paradigmatic classification, phylogenetic analysis, distance graphs, and geometric morphometrics. Each method builds on the others in logical fashion, which allows creation of testable hypotheses concerning cultural transmission and the evolutionary processes that shape it, including invention (mutation), selection, and drift. For examples, we turn to several case studies that focus on Early Paleoindian–period projectile points from eastern North America, the earliest widespread and currently recognizable remains of hunter–gatherers in late Pleistocene North America.

Anthropology has always had as one of its goals the explanation of human cultural diversity across space and through time. Over the past few years, there has been a growing appreciation among anthropologists that the approaches biologists have developed to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of species are useful tools for building and explaining patterns of human diversity. One of these methods is cladistics, which is a means of creating testable propositions of heritable continuity—how one thing is related to another in terms of descent. Cladistics has now been applied to a number of cultural data sets. Here we discuss several of these studies, paying particular attention to a series of related papers in which we have applied cladistics to stone tools in an effort to shed light on the early prehistory of North America. Together, these studies demonstrate that cladistics can be fruitfully applied to a range of questions concerning cultural evolutionary processes and events in prehistory.

Fine art objects are often described as representative of certain craft or artistic traditions. In the case of Thai bronze Buddha images, art historical scholarship suggests that new styles often emerged from combinations of older styles transmitted between craft specialists. This process of transmission with modification is a key attribute of Darwinian evolutionary processes and suggests that lineages of artistic traditions such as Buddha images may be fruitfully investigated using quantitative evolutionary methods. The dominant method for reconstructing evolutionary lineages is cladistics. A cladistic analysis of 42 well-provenanced images in the Griswold collection is presented here to evaluate the usefulness of this approach. Six statistical tests are employed to determine if historical lineages can be reliably reconstructed using cladistic methods. All tests support the robustness of the results of the cladistic analysis. Quantitative evolutionary methods are concluded to be suitable and useful for understanding the evolution of craft traditions such as Thai bronze Buddha images.

The calculated addition of 90–95% of the material culture provided by wood and fiber artifacts in wet or waterlogged sites along the Northwest Coast of North America has hugely expanded the understanding of items of daily manufacture and use for at least 9,000 years. To understand the manufacture and use of these “foreign” (to archaeologists) but dominant artifacts, Native Americans now, more than ever, provide a critical analytic and interpretive cultural knowledge. Our recent tribe/college team effort at the Qwu?gwes wet site in Washington State, U.S.A., is one example of how this partnership is not only analytically needed, but also, because of the wet site importance to Native Americans, why archaeologists need to become trained and involved in wet site investigations.

In recent decades, phylogenetic methods originated in evolutionary biology have been put forward as fruitful strategies to trace and reconstruct the origin, development, distribution, and interrelatedness of archaeological artifacts and traditions. Artifact phylogenies are increasingly being used by archaeologists to infer, develop, and test hypotheses about the processes that originate and shape material culture sets, as well as to study the extent and rates of cultural innovation, borrowing, diffusion, convergence, and loss. As an analytical tool, cultural phylogenetics can also be used to test hypotheses about the emergence, change, and exchange of artifact types, thereby allowing researchers to make inferences about temporal and regional behavioral patterns. This chapter will review some basic concepts of cultural phylogenetics, discuss its applications in archaeology, and reflect on some of the main challenges and prospects faced by the field.

Recent research at the Puget Sound site of Qwu?gwes indicates that it contains a Late Period component of stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts, as well as a waterlogged section containing basketry, cordage and wooden artifacts and associated manufacturing debris. In order to place Qwu?gwes into the culture historical context of the Central Northwest Coast, we have applied cladistic tree-building methods to data derived from these artifacts and from artifacts commonly found in the northern part of Puget Sound, the Gulf of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington State, and Vancouver Island. The tree derived from the stone, bone-antler and shell data differs from the trees derived from the basketry data. This suggests that there was a difference in the transmission of information regarding the manufacture and use of the two groups of artifacts. Ideas pertaining to the artifacts made of stone, bone-antler and shell seem to have been shared widely, whereas ideas associated with the artifacts made of basketry were not. There are several possible explanations for this difference, but ethnographic evidence suggests that it is probably primarily a result of the basketry artifacts playing a role in ethnic identity signaling in a way that the stone, bone-antler and shell artifacts did not.

Inferring and explaining cultural patterns and the ways in which human groups relate and interact over large spans of time or space is one of the biggest challenges for archaeologists. When dealing with either the remote past or the present , researchers struggle to learn about the conditions and mechanisms by which cultural traits originate, move, change, and disappear. The use of phylogenetic methods, originated in evolutionary biology to measure relatedness between species , can help to make signifi cant advances toward those aims. This introduction maps the fi eld of cultural phylogenetics, considers its potential for archaeological research, and summarizes the proposals laid out by the contributors of this book.

Homology is a fundamental concept in historical sciences, i.e. those disciplinary fields aimed at explaining natural phenomena in terms of causes that operated in the  deep past. In archaeology, the interest for homology recognition has notoriously increased in recent years under the influence of the evolutionary paradigm. In this field of inquiry, the prevailing approach to homology is one based on the cladistic methodology. As a consequence, the homology concept lying behind most of the current phylogenetic studies on artifacts, including lithics, is a narrow one almost exclusively based on the similarity criterion. The aim of this paper is to underscore the need to enlarge the framework for homology recognition and testing in evolutionary archaeology by adopting a developmental perspective, based on the study of ontogenetic trajectories of artifacts on an individual and population basis. It is argued that the success of such an approach is highly dependent on the acquisition of a detailed knowledge about the relative contribution, on morphological variation patterns, of factors controlling the ontogeny of artifactual phenotypes, i.e. developmental homeostasis (through canalization or developmental stability) vs. phenotypic plasticity. These and closely related issues, like the assessing and quantification of the relative contribution of informational and environmental factors to the constitution of artifactual phenotypes, should integrate an agenda for future work on this topic.

Co-written with palaeontologist Dr James Valentine (Charles Darwin University, Darwin), this paper presents the results of the first known attempt at applying cladistics to Nubian archaeological material. These preliminary results show that there is a clear differentiation between the Pan Grave culture and other Middle Nubian groups, and also that regional variants may be identified within the Pan Grave ceramic tradition. The results are still at a preliminary stage, however the variation in the ceramic repertoire may reflect a level of regional variation and heterogeneity in the Pan Grave culture itself.
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In a previous paper (Scheinsohn and Szumik 2007) patterns of spatial distribution of archaeological materials were identified in Northwestern Patagonia in order to test the existence of different populations at the forest and the steppe of Late Holocene NW Patagonia (see Casamiquela 1965, Albornoz and Cuneo 2000, Hajduk et al. 2004). In that occasion, results did not hold any difference but problems in sampling and in codification were found. In this paper we review that work focusing on rock art (a line of evidence which showed the best results in previous work), widening the sample and revising codification, changing number, clustering and states of characters. As in the previous work, patterns obtained do not support any differences in terms of environmental criteria but other interpretations are offered and discussed.

The contribution of language history to the study of the early dispersals of modem humans throughout the Old World has been limited by the shallow time depth (about 8000 2000 years) of current linguistic methods. Here it is shown that the application of biological cladistic methods, not to vocabulary (as has been previously tried) but to language structure (sound systems and grammar), may extend the time depths at which language data can be used. The method was tested against well-understood families of Oceanic Austronesian languages, then applied to the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, a group of hitherto unrelatable isolates. Papuan languages show an archipelago-based phylogenetic signal that is consistent with the current geographical distribution of languages. The most plausible hypothesis to explain this result is the divergence of the Papuan languages from a common ancestral stock, as part of late Pleistocene dispersals.

Hood, A.G.E., Valentine, J. (2012) The Application of Cladistics to Early Dynastic Ceramics: Applying a new method. In: Knoblauch C., Gill, J., (eds.), Egyptology in Australia and New Zealand 2009: Proceedings of the conference held in Melbourne, September 4th – 6th. Pp. 47 – 59.

This book attempts to show why and how the theory of evolution is relevant to the study of material culture and human cultural change in Archaeology. Firstly, the main theoretical points of Darwinian philosophy are presented to a humanist readership. Secondly, a detailed introduction is given to the practical application of this epistemology in the tasks of classification and sequencing of archaeological data, thus introducing the reader to the phylogenetic methodology, and especially to Cladistics.

Los estudios referidos a los materiales líticos (v.g. artefactos, ecofactos y fuentes de materias primas) representan, en arqueología, una de las líneas de investigación con mayor tradición y desarrollo. Entre las razones que explican el importante rol que han cumplido y cumplen los estudios
líticos en nuestro campo, se encuentran la ubicuidad de tales materiales, la diversidad de su uso en el pasado y su perdurabilidad, lo cual contrasta con las propiedades típicas de otros constituyentes del registro arqueológico.
A lo largo de las décadas, los estudios líticos han crecido a través de la incorporación de nuevas perspectivas que han enriquecido y ampliado, de diferente modo, la aproximación básica —de carácter fundamentalmente descriptivo y comparativo— al conocimiento de los conjuntos artefactuales. De este modo, a la perspectiva descriptivo/clasificatoria tradicional (usualmente
tipológica o técno-tipológica) se han sumado, entre otros, estudios funcionales, experimentales, geoquímicos, petrológicos, de residuos o adherencias, espaciales, tafonómicos y morfométricos. En muchos casos, las diversas líneas de evidencia se han integrado en marcos interpretativos particulares, tales como los de cadena operativa, secuencias de reducción, organización tecnológica y, más recientemente, de transmisión cultural.
En este contexto, el objetivo central del presente curso es introducir a los doctorandos y profesionales interesados (procedentes de las distintas ramas de la Antropología) en un conjunto seleccionado de aproximaciones actuales —definidas en función de preguntas, perspectivas
teóricas, aplicaciones metodológicas y técnicas— en el campo de los estudios líticos. Tales problemas (tafonomía lítica, análisis espaciales basados en el uso de SIG, perspectiva fenotípica en el estudio de los patrones de variación artefactual, análisis de morfometría geométrica y cladísticos) se caracterizan por su relevancia en términos de la interpretación y explicación arqueológica, así como
por su relativa novedad y escasa, aun, popularización dentro de la comunidad académica. A este respecto, se considera importante que los alumnos adquieran conocimientos específicos en relación con nuevas tendencias teórico-metodológicas y, sobre todo, desarrollen criterios que les permitan integrar en forma coherente tales conocimientos a las prácticas que resultan habituales dentro de la
especialidad (i.e. definición de problemas, especificación de líneas de evidencia relevantes, elección de vías teórico-metodológicas de abordaje, evaluación de resultados), así como explorar la posible complementariedad entre estos nuevos enfoques y los marcos interpretativos preexistentes (v.g. organización tecnológica, secuencias de reducción, transmisión cultural).
Location: Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, República Argentina
Event Date: May 2, 2016
Conference End Date: May 6, 2016
Conference Start Date: May 2, 2016
Research Interests: Análisis Lítico, Tafonomía Lítica, Morfometria Geometrica, GIS, ANALISIS ESPACIAL, Cladistica, and Fenotipo Artefactual