Theme:
4. Persisting with Change: Theory and Archaeological Scrutiny
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Evolutionary Approaches to Archaeological Questions: Human Behavioral Ecology and Cultural Transmission Theory
Content:
Archaeology is the study of human behavior through its enduring material record. As such, it is important that we develop general understandings of human behavior and how people respond to changes in both the natural and social environments. Advances in archaeological methods and analytical tools have greatly enhanced our ability to describe the archaeological record. However, big data approaches and cutting-edge modeling tools may yield little explanatory power unless coupled with general theory, as atheoretical approaches generally struggle with framing questions, deriving predictions, overcoming issues of equifinality, and making inferences beyond direct analogy. A general theory of human behavior is needed to overcome these persistent issues. Two promising evolutionary approaches to understanding variation in human behavior and the material record are Behavioral Ecology (BE) and Cultural Transmission Theory/Dual Inheritance Theory (CTT/DIT). Both draw on evolutionary concepts to derive and test hypotheses using archaeological data to understand past human behavior, with important implications for the present and future. BE generally explains behavioral variation as adaptive responses to variations in the environment and is agnostic about the mechanisms involved (i.e., genetic, cultural). BE concludes that the behavioral diversity observed in humans is a direct result of the diversity in contemporary socioecological environments. CTT/DIT holds that both genetics, culture, and the natural environment influences human behavior, and that culturally and genetically inherited information are acted upon by evolutionary forces and structure human behavior. BE and CTT/DIT are often juxtaposed, but there is an opportunity to synthesize the two into a pluralistic discipline focused on the evolutionary study of human behavior to overcome the domain specific limitations of both. In this session, we highlight BE and CTT/DIT archaeology research to demonstrate their utility, facilitate discussion, and advance archaeological theory by pursuing their synthetization.
Keywords:
archaeological theory, cultural evolution, cultural transmission, behavioral ecology
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Peter Yaworsky (Denmark) 1
Co-organisers:
Elena Miu (Denmark) 1
Weston McCool (United States) 2
Affiliations:
1. Aarhus University
2. University of Utah
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