Session: #593

Content:

Since the mid-1980s Cultural Evolutionary Theory (Boyd and Richerson 1985) has ignited and fueled the cross pollination between biological and social sciences at a global scale, often leading to the emergence of well-established subfields and research agenda. The impact of cultural evolutionary theory on the social sciences has been mixed. On the one hand, it shed light on the variety of social learning processes underpinning change in the frequency of past and present cultural traits, on the diffusion of culture and behaviour over time and space, on the impact of such mechanisms on the differential persistence of subsistence strategies as well as social, economic, and political responses. It helped introduce concepts of uncertainty, data quality, and lack of resolution in archaeological assemblages.
On the other hand, the success of Evolutionary Archaeology (i.e. the application of this framework to the study of material culture and its links to biological, social, demographic, and environmental processes; e.g. Shennan 2008) is nowhere close to what is being achieved by evolutionary anthropology. Although a number of active practitioners exist, its impact on the broader field has not achieved what was initially envisioned. Most archaeologists are simply not aware of its underlying theoretical framework, and at worst Evolutionary Archaeology is still confused with some modern form of Spencerian social Darwinism. This round table will reflect on why after at least three decades, Evolutionary Archaeology failed to reach its initial goals, whether its primary contribution will be forever limited to the introduction of few theoretical concepts and statistical methods, whether it needs radical rethinking or rebranding, and whether all this matters.

Session: #593

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