Cladistics and Cultural Phylogenies

North American fluted projectile points are the quintessential temporally diagnostic artifacts, occurring over a relatively short time span, from ca. 13,300 calBP to ca. 11,900 calBP, commonly referred to as the Early Paleoindian period. Painting with a broad brush, points from the Plains and Southwest exhibit less diversity in shape than what is found in the East, especially for the later half of the Early Paleoindian period. It remains unclear how various fluted-point forms relate to each other and whether the continent-wide occurrence of the earliest fluted-point forms represents a single cultural expression, albeit with regional differences. We used phylogenetic analysis to evaluate fluted-point classes from the eastern United States. Preliminary results suggest that there is both temporal and spatial patterning of some classes and that much of the variation in form has to do with modifications to hafting elements. Although our analyses are presently at a coarse scale, it appears that different kinds of learning could contribute in part to regional differences in point shape.

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.

"This is a link to my full PhD thesis, parts of which are in the process of being sent for publication.

"The Late Stone Age (LSA) of East Africa is a diverse period of recent human prehistory. Despite the temporal proximity to today, these prehistoric people and their technological traditions are still poorly described and little understood. The Nakuru-Naivasha Basin, Kenya, has the best documented examples of the East African LSA (Eburran, nee Kenya Capsian), the diversity of which is manifested in an abundance of archaeological sites that show a confusing complexity of unexplained technological variation. Research stagnated at the end of the 1980's, after the Kenya Capsian classification system (phases A-E) was replaced with the Eburran (phases I-V) which confined the Nakuru-Naivasha industry to within 25 km of Mount Eburru. Modern research techniques within a novel research paradigm are applied to revitalise the study of this important prehistoric period. Firstly, historically collected evidence which lacks vital research information is modernised using archival investigation and mapping software. Secondly, the temporal and spatial variation of lithic artefacts and sites (12.5-2.5 kya) are described using univariate statistical analyses of attributes taken from a diverse sample of 36 LSA occurrences from 30 sites (2200 lithic tools and 220 cores); 6 further sites are included as a comparative framework of other localised technological traditions (SPN, Elmenteitan and Lukenya Hill). Thirdly, the relationship between the LSA technology and the shifting Holocene palaeo-environment is examined using multivariate statistics. Finally, technological characteristics that exhibit little ecological plasticity are used in a cultural cladistic analysis to infer information about prehistoric populations. Geometric microlith and core sizes show high levels of environmental plasticity (72.7% and 80.4%), and should not be used to define industrial boundaries in this area; as a result, the Eburran classification system is challenged. Likewise, the industry extends outside of the imposed 25 km boundary. It is argued that the original name of Kenya Capsian should be reinstated for this LSA industry, but not the phases defined within it. Instead, a clade based system is suggested, which is able to cope with the variation exhibited by the technology until a comprehensive classification system can be created; this will only be possible with greater research investment and novel evidence. Ultimately, the prehistoric people of the Kenya Capsian exhibit similar population patterns to the tribal system in Kenya today, which would explain why the LSA is so beautifully diverse and complex in this area.""

Nella Summa Theologiae Tommaso d’Acquino presenta quattro proprietà che descrivono in sintesi il funzionamento dell’arte della memoria medievale (Tommaso d’Aquino 1996, 396): l’uso delle imagines agentes, il sistema dei loci, la necessità di connettere le immagini ad una passione forte e la pratica della costante rievocazione degli stessi ragionamenti. Innumerevoli sono gli studi che hanno ricostruito la tortuosa genealogia di questo “artefatto mentale”  rappresentato dall’ars memoriae (Rossi 1960; Yates 1972; Bolzoni 1995; Carruthers 2002), e tuttavia solo negli ultimi anni si è cercato di disancorare il cosiddetto universo delle arti della memoria (Severi 2004; 2018) dalla sua concezione eurocentrica. Si potrebbe incominciare ad affermare, ad esempio, che le tecniche della memoria artificiale sono universalmente diffuse (Kelly 2017), e che attraverso lo studio delle loro trasformazioni e dei loro principi sia possibile reinterpretare il funzionamento di artefatti, iconografie e strutture architettoniche non-moderne (Marot 2010).
Le trasformazioni delle modalità di lettura di testi ed immagini legate alla rivoluzione digitale (Big Data, modalità di iper-lettura, machine learning applicato alla critica letteraria ed alla storia dell’arte, etc.) (Carr 2010; Hayles 2012; Wolf 2018) hanno portato alla formulazione dell’attuale paradigma della cultural analytics (Manovich 2009; 2018). Allo stesso tempo, lo studio neuroscientifico dei principi del riconoscimento visivo (Ramachandran e Hirstein 1999; Shen et al. 2017) unito alla nascita di una vera e propria digital art history (Saleh et al. 2016) impongono la necessità di rivedere criticamente le modalità di insegnamento e ricerca nel campo dei visual studies.
La nostra proposta si inserisce nel tentativo di comprendere i cambiamenti nelle pratiche pedagogiche e di ricerca resi possibili dall’apporto delle neuroscienze e delle digital humanities (Larsonneur et al. 2015). In particolare, ci vorremo focalizzare sull’utilizzo del concetto di mente estesa (Clark 2008), sviluppato nell’ambito della filosofia della scienze cognitive, per rileggere criticamente alcune posizioni particolarmente allarmiste che interpretano la transizione alla iper-lettura digitale (motori di ricerca, scansione dei testi, eccessiva abbondanza di stimoli informativi) come una catastrofe cognitiva (Carr 2010; 2014). Provando a ripensare la relazione fra la modularità mentale e la plasticità delle nostre facoltà di percezione, attenzione ed apprendimento (Citton 2014; Malabou 2017) vorremo analizzare in che modo l’impiego di nuove forme di lettura e produzione di testi ed immagini digitali posseggano delle caratteristiche peculiari che riattualizzano le antiche tecniche di manipolazione dei luoghi e delle immagini proprie delle arti della memoria. Nel tentativo di immaginare una possibile ecologia dell’attenzione, dello sguardo e della memoria, le tecniche di concentrazione, di trasformazione delle forme verbali in rappresentazioni iconiche e di orientamento nel Denkraum (Kurt W. e Mazzocco 2002) potrebbero fornire la soluzione all’annoso problema dell’apparente logoramento della memoria collettiva (Candia et al. 2018).

The chaînes opératoires underlying the manufacture of objects are good proxies for studying social groups and how cultural traits are transmitted and modified through the learning process. With the rise of evolutionary archaeology, the evolution of ceramic vessels can be modeled by using cladistics to elaborate kinship relationships between different taxa on the basis of shared derived character states. Here the modeling applies to ceramic fashioning from the European Middle Bronze Age (France and the United Kingdom). The aim is to assess the nature of the evolution and the relationships between three main cultures—in southern England, Normandy, and in the center-west of France. The cladistics analysis highlights that the ceramic traditions largely result from a process of phylogenesis—a result of descent with modification from an ancestral assemblage—rooted in the Early Bronze Age, suggesting a common origin for the Trevisker/Deverel-Rimbury and French Atlantic technical traditions. On the other hand, the Norman appears to be related to the Duffaits tradition, but to the exclusion of the Trevisker/Deverel-Rimbury traditions. This study supports the theoretical premise that some technical sequences are more stable than others. The evolution of sequences requiring motor habits, such as shaping, stabilized fairly quickly, unlike the finishing operations that continued to diverge throughout the Bronze Age. This study suggests that cladistics based on the description of the ceramic material in terms of chaînes opératoires is a useful tool for studying cultural change.

Introduces a framework for benchmarking organisations – “evolutionary benchmarking”. Discusses the concept and operation of the framework, along with its proposed advantages in aiding benchmarking. The benchmarking approach proposed utilises an evolutionary classification method called cladistics. Uses an example classification of automotive assembly plants to show how the proposed framework helps benchmarking in terms of: providing a framework for representing benchmarking information; enhancing the quality and validity of the information according to the classification rules of parsimony, congruence and homology; and providing a comparison that indicates how the practices should be adopted. This framework is considered to be useful to researchers who study benchmarking methodologies and those that categorise the findings of benchmarking studies.

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.

Históricamente, la antropología y la biología mantienen una relación, en la que los antropólogos se han beneficiado de métodos y teorías que pueden aplicar dentro de su propio campo de estudio. Por ejemplo: los antropólogos decimonónicos hallaron en la teoría de la evolución, una justificación para clasificar a las sociedades en: salvajes, bárbaras o civilizadas. El evolucionismo unilineal no resistió las pruebas científicas convirtiéndose en un claro ejemplo de etnocentrismo científico. Actualmente los antropólogos usan la cladística para estudiar la evolución cultural. Aquí se responde: ¿Qué es cladística?, ¿Por qué se puede usar en Antropología? y ¿Cómo los antropólogos la han usado?

The classification of kin into structured groups is a diverse phenomenon which is ubiquitous in human culture. For populations which are organized into large agropastoral groupings of sedentary residence but not governed within the context of a centralised state, such as our study sample of 83 historical Bantu-speaking groups of sub-Saharan Africa, cultural kinship norms guide all aspects of everyday life and social organization. Such rules operate in part through the use of differing terminological referential systems of familial organization. Although the cross-cultural study of kinship terminology was foundational in Anthropology, few modern studies have made use of statistical advances to further our sparse understanding of the structuring and diversification of terminological systems of kinship over time. In this study we use Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods of phylogenetic comparison to investigate the evolution of Bantu kinship terminology and reconstruct the ancestral state and diversification of cousin terminology in this family of sub-Saharan ethnolinguistic groups. Using a phylogenetic tree of Bantu languages, we then test the prominent hypothesis that structured variation in systems of cousin terminology has co-evolved alongside adaptive change in patterns of descent organization, as well as rules of residence. We find limited support for this hypothesis, and argue that the shaping of systems of kinship terminology is a multifactorial process, concluding with possible avenues of future research.

In this paper, we introduce a novel way of understanding organizational resilience. We suggest that organizational resilience can be profitably viewed as an evolutionary process in which organizations adapt their configurations in response to changes in two external conditions — disturbance and munificence. Focusing on the contexts of manufacturing and operations management, we begin by explaining the concepts of organizational configuration and resilience. We then present a framework that views resilience-driven configuration change as an evolutionary process of variation, selection, and retention for a population of firms. The final component of this framework is the use of the cladistic method of classification to develop a hypothesis of the branching order of configuration change. We conclude the paper by presenting a typology that shows how different levels of munificence and disturbance combine to produce two types of adaptive resilience (cladogenetic and anagenetic) and one type of non-adaptive resilience (inertia). We also explain how phylograms can be used to indicate the amount of time separating different organizational configurations.

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.

The contribution of language history to the study of the early dispersals of modern 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 ...

This article presents a case for the construction of a formal classification of manufacturing systems using cladistics, a technique from the biological school of classification. A seven-stage framework for producing a manufacturing cladogram is presented, along with a pilot case study example. This article describes the role that classification plays in the pure and applied sciences, and the social sciences and reviews the status of existing manufacturing classifications. If organisational diversity and organisational change processes are governed by evolutionary mechanisms, studies of organisations based on an evolutionary approach such as cladistics could have potential, because as March states “there is natural speculation that organisations, like species can be engineered by understanding the evolutionary processes well enough to intervene and produce competitive organisational effects” [March JG. The evolution of evolution. In: Baum JAC, Singh JV, editors. Evolutionary dynamics of organizations. Oxford University Press, 1994. p. 39-52]. It is suggested that a cladistic study could provide organisations with a “knowledge map” of the ecosystem in which they exist and by using this phylogenetic and situational analysis, they could determine coherent and appropriate action for the specification of change.