Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution

✍ Scribed by Stephen Shennan (editor)

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 349
• Series: Origins of Human Behavior and Culture; 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research, the touchstone of any worthwhile theoretical perspective. While many recent works on cultural evolution adopt a specific theoretical framework, such as dual inheritance theory or human behavioral ecology, Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution emphasizes empirical analysis and includes authors who employ a range of backgrounds and methods to address aspects of culture from an evolutionary perspective. Editor Stephen Shennan has assembled archaeologists, evolutionary theorists, and ethnographers, whose essays cover a broad range of time periods, localities, cultural groups, and artifacts.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One. Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution
Understanding Cultural Transmission
Two. Placing Archaeology within a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution
Three. Human Communication as Niche Construction
Four. Modes of Transmission and Material Culture Patterns in Craft Skills
Five. Linking Pattern to Process in Cultural Evolution
Six. Tangled Trees
Seven. The Evolution of Material Culture Diversity among Iranian Tribal Populations
Eight. Evolutionary Explanation and the Record of Interest
Nine. Identifying Iron Production Lineages
Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses
Ten. Quantitative Analysis of Macroevolutionary Patterning in Technological Evolution
Eeleven. Innovation Diffusion and Traveling Waves
Twelve. Explaining Global Patterns in Lower Paleolithic Technology
Thirteen. Population History and the Evolution of Mesolithic Arrowhead Technology in South Scandinavia
Fourteen. Experimentation and Innovation in the Archaeological Record
Social Evolution
Fifteen. Mind the Bonding Gap
Sixteen. Testing Functional Hypotheses about Cross-Cultural Variation
Seventeen. Parent–Offspring Conflict in Marriage
Eighteen. Prestige Goods and the Formation of Political Hierarchy
Nineteen. Population and Warfare
Twenty. An Ecological Model for the Emergence of Institutionalized Social Hierarchies on California’s Northern Channel Islands
Twenty-one. Population, Sociopolitical Simplification, and Cultural Evolution of Levantine Neolithic Villages
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX