Archaeological Theory Today E-Book

Ian Hodder

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 615

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Now in a revised and updated second edition, this volume provides an authoritative account of the current status of archaeological theory, as presented by some of its major exponents and innovators over recent decades. It summarizes the latest developments in the field and looks to its future, exploring some of the cutting-edge ideas at the forefront of the discipline. The volume captures the diversity of contemporary archaeological theory. Some authors argue for an approach close to the natural sciences, others for an engagement with cultural debate about representation of the past. Some minimize the relevance of culture to societal change, while others see it as central; some focus on the contingent and the local, others on long-term evolution. While few practitioners in theoretical archaeology would today argue for a unified disciplinary approach, the authors in this volume increasingly see links and convergences between their perspectives. The volume also reflects archaeology's new openness to external influences, as well as the desire to contribute to wider debates. The contributors examine ways in which archaeological evidence contributes to theories of evolutionary psychology, as well as to the social sciences in general, where theories of social relationships, agency, landscape and identity are informed by the long-term perspective of archaeology. The new edition of Archaeological Theory Today will continue to be essential reading for students and scholars in archaeology and in the social sciences more generally.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

1 INTRODUCTION

The community of discourses model

From “theory” to “theory of”

Variation in perspective

Convergences

Conclusion

2 DARWINIAN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

The cultural evolutionary program

Relating cultural evolution theory to the archaeological record

Evolutionary phylogenies

Niche construction

Gene–culture co-evolution

3 HUMAN BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY

HBE versus evolutionary archaeology: levels of explanation

Questions about function

HBE versus agency theory: formal modeling

Foraging theory

An archaeological problem: broad-spectrum transitions

Actualistic tests: some ethnographic examples

Signaling theory

Conclusion

4 BEHAVIORAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Goals of behavioral archaeology

Behavioral frameworks for studying the past through the archaeological record

Frameworks for studying human behavior in the past and in the present

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

5 COMPLEX SYSTEMS AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Some history

Central concepts

Methodological attractors

Trajectories

Conclusions: relationships of CS with other archaeologies

Acknowledgments

6 TOWARDS A COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY

The sapient paradox

The cognitive basis of material engagement

Symbol before concept

A crucial nexus: towards inequality and power

The European trajectory in the Bronze Age

Symbols, ritual, and religion

Converging approaches

7 AGENCY

The explanatory detour

Society, agency, and structure

An outline alternative

The archaeology of agency

Conclusion

8 ARCHAEOLOGIES OF PLACE AND LANDSCAPE

Introduction: duplicitous landscapes

Landscape art and the landscape idea

Landscape, perception, and being-in-the-world

Ethnographies of landscape: embedded and multiple worlds

Experiencing monuments and landscapes

Conclusion

9 MATERIALITY

What is materiality?

Materiality as material relations

Materiality as social relations

Materiality as vitality

Materiality as ensemble

Materiality, behavioral chains, and the chaîne opératoire

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

10 SYMMETRICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The genealogy of a concept

Things and difference

The gathering past

An ethics extended to things

Carved care

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

11 THE SOCIAL LIFE OF HERITAGE

A wider framing

Archaeologies of the modern

Heritage and hybrid fieldwork

Summary

12 POST-COLONIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Bamiyan: local action and global outrage

Understanding colonialism

Disciplinary histories and current debates

Slowly becoming post-colonial: ethics, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora

Acknowledgments

13 ARCHAEOLOGY AND INDIGENOUS COLLABORATION

Evolution and revolution

Traditions and contributions

Problems and prospects

Conclusion

14 ARCHAEOLOGICAL VISUALIZATION

Archaeological visualization as product and process

Appraising the archaeological image

Artistic versus archaeological realism in illustration

Establishing the prototype: Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum

Theorizing the archaeological image

Acknowledgments

Index

Copyright © this collection Polity Press 2012. Chapter 6 © Colin Renfrew

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures

1.1    One possible view of the historical relationships between the approaches discussed in this book, and of the contemporary relationships claimed by authors between them 2.1    Map of the distribution of the archaeobotany assemblage sample sites, showing the boundaries of the regions used in the analysis 2.2    Evolutionary tree of early Neolithic archaeobotanical assemblages from southwest Asia and Europe 4.1    A generalized object life history 5.1    David Clarke in 1972 5.2    Papers with “complexity” in title or topic from 1980 to 2010 in journals indexed by ISI Web of Knowledge. 5.3    Proposed group sizes associated with stone circles of various sizes in Bronze Age Ireland 5.4    Network formed among Middle Bronze Age Cycladic sites by taking the size of the vertices (sites) to be proportional to their strength and to the total weight of the in- and out-going edges 6.1    Variations of cognition 6.2    The interrelationship between four crucial concepts 14.1    Four glass vessels from the dal Pozzo Paper Museum 14.2    Collection of bottles from the dal Pozzo Paper Museum 14.3    Series of vase type from the dal Pozzo Paper Museum 14.4    Metal utensils from the dal Pozzo Paper Museum 

Tables

4.1    A behavioral chain segment for maize in Hopi subsistence activities (ca. AD 1900) 4.2    The four strategies of behavioral archaeology 

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

John C. Barrett is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield.

Douglas W. Bird is Senior Research Scientist in the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh is Curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Chris Gosden is Chair of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

Ian Hodder is Dunlevie Family Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Carl Knappett is Associate Professor of Aegean Prehistory at the University of Toronto.

Timothy A. Kohler is Regents Professor of Archaeology at the Washington State University, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Research Associate at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.

Vincent M. LaMotta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Lynn Meskell is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University.

Stephanie Moser is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

James F. O’Connell is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah.

Bjørnar Olsen is Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Tromsø.

Colin Renfrew is Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Stephen Shennan is Professor of Theoretical Archaeology at University College London (UCL) and Director of the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

Julian Thomas is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester.

2

DARWINIAN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

Stephen Shennan

The use of ideas based on Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain patterns in the archaeological record has become increasingly popular in recent years. One can speculate about the reasons for this but they certainly include the view on the part of those who have taken this path that evolutionary theory provides a highly productive framework for archaeology, in the sense that it has the potential to generate open-ended programs of empirical research that produce rigorous and convincing results. By theory here I mean something more specific than what is often meant in archaeology: a set of well-founded principles which provide a basis for explaining patterns of variation in the world. In the case of the biological world the edifice of Darwinian evolutionary theory that has been built up over the last 150 years provides the principles and has produced a variety of remarkably productive research programs at all levels from the micro-scale genetic to macro-scale palaeontological history covering millions of years. The development of the idea that explaining patterns of stability and change in the material record of human existence can be encompassed within the same framework is much more recent, although it has early precursors. The fact that the intensive development of evolutionary research in general, and evolutionary theory in particular, has a much longer history in biology means that it has been a sensible strategy for archaeologists to start with ideas and methods from biology and explore the ways in which they need to be modified to accurately represent cultural processes. Indeed, archaeologists are not alone in this but are part of a broader movement towards the creation of an evolutionary social science that includes psychology, sociology, economics, and anthropology as well as archaeology.

In fact, the adoption of Darwinian approaches to understanding the archaeological record has been based on two distinct foundations, to some degree competitive, to some degree complementary, one based on the ideas of human behavioral ecology (HBE) and the other on some version of cultural evolution or dual inheritance theory (DIT). In the former, hypotheses to account for patterns of stability or change are based on models of the costs and benefits of different courses of action in a given context. Humans, like other animals, are assumed to have evolved cognitive propensities to maximize the ratio of benefits to costs; natural selection operates to favor those with the inherited ability to make the best judgments. On this basis, models of the optimal course of action can be developed: for example, in the making of hunting decisions. It is not assumed that these models account for the patterns observed; the object of the exercise is to assess whether they do or not. The argument is that evolutionary theory provides a strong basis for taking such cost–benefit models as a productive starting point for many archaeological questions. They are not considered in any detail here, not because I consider them unhelpful or invalid but because they are dealt with in another chapter in this volume. However, I will have occasion below to compare them with DIT models.

The key feature of the other category of work is the role it attaches to culture, and thus to cultural transmission and the processes that affect it. Culture does not feature in HBE models except insofar as they consider the role of technology in affecting costs and benefits, but even here the existence or availability of relevant technologies is taken for granted and analysis is limited to the question of how one technology or another affects the relation between costs and benefits in a given situation (e.g. Bettinger et al. 2006; Ugan et al. 2003). In cultural evolution or dual inheritance models a major role in generating patterns in human action and its outcomes is attached to the process of cultural transmission, and the forces that act on it, and not simply to cost–benefit distributions. Culture, generally defined as some version of the formulation “information capable of affecting individuals’ behavior which they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission” (Richerson and Boyd 2005: 5), is itself taken as a domain in which evolutionary processes operate, at least semi-independently from the domain of natural selection operating on propensities with some sort of genetic foundation.

In this chapter I will first review the key features of what may be called the “cultural evolutionary program” in archaeology and the social sciences more generally, before going on to look at the problems posed by trying to make use of it to understand the archaeological record, some of the methods that have been developed to do this, and the results they have produced. Finally, I will look at the potential for future developments in the field of gene–culture co-evolution and niche construction theory, where aspects of an extended human behavioral ecology and the cultural evolutionary program come together.

The cultural evolutionary program

The main evolutionary processes operating in the cultural domain have been extensively discussed in the literature since the early work of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) and Boyd and Richerson (1985) and there is no need to go into them again in detail here (for recent summaries, see, e.g., Richerson and Boyd 2005; Shennan 2008), but it is important to be clear about the fundamentals. Evolutionary processes require mechanisms that generate variation, that pass it on, and that act on what is passed on to increase the prevalence of some things at the expense of others. Without a transmission process there can be no evolutionary theory of culture, because there is no transmitted variation on which selection and other processes can act. What people do at any particular time simply depends on the goal-dependent choices they make in relation to aspects of their cultural, social, and physical environments; in other words, it is simply an aspect of people’s phenotypic plasticity.

Evolutionary processes involving the generation of variation followed by selective retention are fundamental in culture as well as in nature because they provide a foundation for making difficult decisions under uncertainty. (The distinction between nature and culture in this very abstract form is not very helpful, however – to be cultural is part of human biology; it is better seen as a contrast in the specifics of transmission mechanisms; see below.) Information which has led to successful decisions in the past becomes encoded and available to future generations, but because individuals are different and variation is constantly being generated, the possibility exists that novel forms of action will be favored by selection in the future, at the expense of existing cultural practices: for example, if social conditions change. However, because the processes of cultural transmission are much more varied than, and generally different from, the symmetrical transmission of genes from each of two parents, cultural transmission also has the potential to produce outcomes that are maladaptive in biological natural selection terms. This is the case even though it is that same variation in transmission routes and processes which gives cultural evolution the advantages it has over genetic evolution of speedier access to a much wider information pool.

The differing starting points of HBE and DIT approaches, relating to the importance or otherwise of cultural transmission in affecting what people do, have major consequences for the direction of research programs in a variety of disciplines and not just archaeology. Are people’s actions mainly affected by some version of a rational evaluation of a given situation, albeit based on incomplete information and simple heuristics (Gigerenzer et al. 1999); or simply by the relative popularity of what those around them are doing? So-called viral marketing is predicated on the latter. Moreover, as Bentley et al. (2011) point out, models of agents with zero intelligence based on particle models from physics have had considerable success in explaining variation in financial asset prices. Such models lie at one end of a spectrum that gives varying amounts of influence to copying others as a basis for decision making. It seems likely that from case to case the importance of some version of rational decision making underpinned by natural selection on psychological propensities, as opposed to cultural transmission processes, will vary, so it is necessary to generate test implications for the alternative hypotheses. Thus, for example, Henrich and Henrich’s (2010) study of food taboos for pregnant and lactating women in Fiji showed not only that the taboos were adaptive, in the sense of significantly decreasing women’s risk of fish poisoning, but also that they depended on a combination of familial learning and learning from a small number of prestigious individuals. The patterns were not compatible with individual learning alone, parental transmission alone, or a combination of parental transmission and individual learning. A research program that excludes from consideration the possibility that processes operating in the course of cultural transmission, and not simply cost–benefit considerations, affect what people do does not seem satisfactory.

The use of cultural evolutionary ideas as a framework for understanding stability and change in the archaeological record is part of a broader interdisciplinary research programme made up of three interrelated strands (cf. Mesoudi et al. 2006). The first involves characterizing the evolutionary processes, including cognitive biases, that produce variation in human cultures, societies, and economies in space and time. This characterization is understandably far less developed than in evolutionary biology. It involves, for example, carrying out psychological experiments to identify the specific factors affecting social learning and the cultural transmission process (e.g. McElreath et al. 2005); ethnoarchaeological studies of patterns of social learning and their consequences with respect to different aspects of material culture (e.g. Roux 2007); and experimental and ethnographic studies of how people evaluate costs and benefits (e.g. Bird et al. 2009). In Henrich and Henrich’s food taboo example the adaptive taboos result not simply from rational decision making based on naturally selected psychological propensities but from a specific transmission process involving learning from family and prestigious individuals. Furthermore, it seems likely that in many cases successful adaptations are achieved by selection acting to favor innovations that accumulate over successive episodes of cultural transmission.

The second strand involves identifying the consequences of the operation of those processes in different conditions by means of modeling (see, e.g., McElreath and Boyd 2007). This is of central importance because the consequences of the operation of specific processes cannot simply be intuited or derived from thinking through the consequences of verbal descriptions. Such modeling has been the core of the cultural evolution research program since its beginning (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981) because of the power of the mathematical population genetics tools on which it is based.

The final strand is specifically archaeological and historical, and involves using an understanding of the processes and their consequences to explain patterns of stability and change at particular times and places in a number of interrelated domains. One such domain concerns the histories of culturally transmitted practices and norms. The identification of such culture historical patterns in different parts of the world has been one of archaeology’s greatest achievements (e.g. Buchvaldek et al. 2007), but traditional culture history had very weak descriptive methods and explanatory mechanisms at its disposal. The developments in cultural evolutionary theory that have taken place in recent years provide the basis for recognizing that different factors affect the differential inheritance and thus prevalence of different cultural practices.

A second domain concerns the history of human populations. Paradoxically perhaps, cultural evolutionary theory and its foregrounding of the process of social learning as the foundation of cultural transmission also give new life to that explanatory mainstay of traditional culture history, the idea that cultural change can be a result of population change. The best-known recent example of this argument is the Renfrew–Bellwood farming and language dispersal hypothesis (see, e.g., Diamond and Bellwood 2003). Whether this particular hypothesis is valid or not, behind it lies the recognition that human populations, like those of any other living creature, are subject to natural selection: they expand when new reproductive opportunities arise, are subject to density-dependent checks but can overshoot local carrying capacities and then decline, or can be negatively affected by adverse environmental conditions or competition from other populations. It has also become apparent that some cultural attributes are strongly subject to vertical parent–child inheritance, or within-community inheritance, as a result of such processes as conformist bias, a tendency not simply to copy actions in proportion to their frequency in the local population but to favor only the most common ones. Thus there really may be an association between specific cultural attributes and specific populations, as traditional archaeologists claimed, even if such attributes do not have a specific ethnic signaling function. In this case, such attributes may simply “hitchhike” as the cultural baggage that happens to be associated with a particular expanding, stable, or declining population and will share its fate. Analyses of DNA are beginning to provide independent evidence of such culture–population links (e.g. Bramanti et al. 2009; Linderholm 2008). However, even if cultural attributes are neutral and change simply as a result of drift, effectively random variation in what is copied, the fact that innovation and drift are dependent on the size of populations and the extent of their interaction means that demographic history remains central to any evolutionary perspective (Shennan 2000; Shennan and Bentley 2008).

The third set of histories is concerned with social institutions and is, in a sense, the familiar agenda of social evolution, but viewed from the perspective of evolutionary game theory (Bowles 2004, chapter 11; Skyrms 1996; and the extensive literature on altruism, e.g. Fehr and Gächter 2002), which examines the payoffs of different competing interaction strategies. At its core are social agents, individuals with norms, dispositions, knowledge, and resources, who make decisions in their own interests in the light of constraints and opportunities, who sometimes innovate and at other times follow existing practices. Those social and economic strategies that produce beneficial outcomes for the agents will spread through the members of the groups concerned, potentially changing the distribution of social norms, and may themselves be replaced if circumstances change. Moreover, when outcomes are aggregated they can have consequences unintended by any individual social actor, including the emergence of qualitatively new forms of social and economic patterns.

There are three reasons why these local actions can produce broad-scale social evolutionary patterns. First, successful patterns of action may spread because they are perceived to be successful by others in similar situations. Second, selection on social, cultural, and economic strategies will often result in similar outcomes in the face of similar situations. Third, processes of self-organization operate in social interactions, leading to convergence on various kinds of “attractors”: thus, for example, in Turchin’s warfare model (Turchin 2003, cited in Kohler et al. 2009), where the prevalence of warfare is dependent on population size and the latter in turn is affected by the incidence of warfare, high levels of warfare will decrease population density, which eventually results in a diminution of warfare, leading again to higher rates of population growth. If there is no change in the local carrying capacity, then over time warfare prevalence and population density will fluctuate but will eventually converge on a stable equilibrium. This equilibrium represents an “attractor” to which the system will converge (Kohler et al. 2009). Accordingly, in order to understand specific large-scale transformations, we do not need to indulge in broad abstractions of the type prevalent in 1960s and 1970s neo-evolution, but need to carry out theoretically informed analyses of particular situations.

A last set of histories concerns “constructed niches” that change selection pressures and produce gene–culture interactions. In an archaeological context the altered physical environments produced by human action are the most obvious constructed niches and would have changed selection processes across the whole range of human activities, from the optimal subsistence strategy to be pursued, to the best of various competing social strategies to pursue in terms of their payoffs, to the prevalent form of prestige goods. I will return to niche construction below because it raises interesting and novel issues concerning the relationship between HBE and DIT approaches, and about the relations between culture and genes.

Relating cultural evolution theory to the archaeological record

The vast majority of the theory that has been developed over the last thirty years has looked at the processes of cultural transmission and evolution from the point of view of the agents involved in the processes, and the factors that affect their decision making. This is obviously an extremely important perspective but it is not the only one. For archaeologists at least it is also important to look at the processes from what might be called “the meme’s-eye view,” the perspective of the cultural attributes themselves, since these are the only data accessible; indeed, they are the only direct data about past cultural traditions and the forces affecting them that we have available. The question then becomes, to what extent is it possible to identify the action of the various cultural evolutionary processes that have been proposed over the last thirty years on the basis of distributions of through-time variation in the past, especially given the often poor temporal resolution of the archaeological record and the enormous range of complex processes that have affected it? This is a classic “inverse problem” of a type very familiar to archaeologists: inferring the micro-scale processes producing a pattern from the pattern itself, as opposed to carrying out designed experiments or making naturalistic observations of processes in the field and examining their consequences.

In fact, even to demonstrate that a pattern of continuity or change through time results from the operation of a cultural inheritance process, as opposed to being a contingent response to local environmental conditions, is not straightforward. Going on to make inferences about the processes acting on the cultural lineages identified is even more difficult, and they look different from the “meme’s” perspective than from the agent’s. Thus, in their recent paper on the evolution of Polynesian canoes, Rogers and Ehrlich (2008) use the term “natural selection” to refer to the process acting on those canoe traits that have a functional significance, and so it is from the perspective of the traits themselves, in that particular traits survive and are copied preferentially as a result of their greater functional effectiveness (cf. Dunnell 1978) – something that could in principle be tested experimentally. What their results do not do is distinguish between natural selection operating on human agents via cultural traits, and thus on the future frequency of those traits, and results bias, where people compare the success of what they’re currently doing with that of others and switch if the latter appears more effective. In other words, the process could have operated as a result of the makers and users of ineffective canoes drowning more frequently, thus leading to the demise of those designs, while groups with better-designed canoes, perhaps different communities, survived and colonized new islands. Alternatively, it could have worked through people observing the performance of different canoe designs and preferentially copying those they perceived as more effective. The latter would potentially be far faster and the implied time-scale difference could provide a basis for distinguishing between the two processes. Making this sort of distinction is actually at the root of some of the most long-standing debates in archaeology: for example, whether the spread of farming into Europe was a process of indigenous adoption (involving results bias) or demographic expansion and extinction (natural selection acting on the bearers of cultural traditions). Note that in both the above scenarios whether or not people reproduce particular traits depends on the specific characteristics of the traits themselves which are under selection; in other words, the characteristics of practices and objects influence the probability that people will replicate them. In the spread of agriculture case, the characteristics are technically functional ones, but that does not have to be the case. They may, for example, be features that appeal to aspects of the human mind, as Gell (1998) suggests in his study of the “enchantment” associated with certain decorative patterns.

An archaeology that attaches importance to cultural transmission and the various selection and bias factors affecting it as playing an important role in accounting for variation in the archaeological record needs to do two things: reconstruct patterns of cultural descent and propose and test explanations for the forces that have shaped such patterns. Reconstruction has been mainly based on seriation studies, and to a lesser extent on the application of phylogenetic methods, though neither is a sine qua non (Lyman and O’Brien 2006; O’Brien and Lyman 2000).

Seriation involves putting phenomena in a sequential order on the basis of some measure of their similarity to one another. If we have independent evidence of the chronological order, for example, of a series of ceramic assemblages, we can test whether the phenomena that are most similar to one another are indeed closest to one another in time. To the extent that they are, continuity is implied. Ultimately, however, our conviction that continuity of cultural transmission is behind the pattern in this case is also based on other knowledge: for example, that the making of pottery is an activity acquired by social learning.

Although seriation has a long history as a means of constructing chronologies, attempts to analyze the forces affecting sequences of assemblages linked by descent whose ordering is independently confirmed are much more recent. The key development here was Neiman’s (1995) demonstration of the way the mathematics of the neutral theory of evolution could be used to generate quantitative expectations of what a distribution of artifact attribute frequencies should look like if cultural drift – the combined effect of innovation and chance variation in what is copied in a finite population – was the only factor affecting it. Neiman’s original case study indicated that patterning in the rim attributes of eastern North American Woodland period pottery was indeed a result of drift, and on this basis he went on to argue that the Woodland period was one of large-scale human interaction, a view that had been held by earlier scholars but had subsequently been rejected. In contrast, my work with Wilkinson (Shennan and Wilkinson 2001) showed that patterning in the frequency through time of decorative attributes of early Neolithic pottery from a small region of Germany indicated a more even distribution of variants than expected under drift in the later phases of the sequence studied: that is, there was an “anti-conformity” bias, with many different types being relatively frequent. Conversely, Kohler et al. (2004) in a case study of decorative designs on pottery from the US Southwest were able to show a departure in the direction of conformity. However, it has become increasingly apparent that non-rejection of the drift model must be treated with caution; it cannot be assumed that drift is the only process operating in these circumstances, since a variety of selection and bias forces may produce outcomes indistinguishable from drift alone (Mesoudi and Lycett 2009; Steele et al. 2010).

Eerkens and Lipo (2005) developed a similar approach to the characterization of neutral variation in continuous measurements and the measurement of departures from it. Psychological studies have shown that below a certain threshold (the so-called Weber fraction), people are incapable of distinguishing differences in physical dimensions; the threshold is relative to the scale of the dimension. Thus, lines that are within 3% of each other in terms of their length cannot be distinguished. Over multiple transmission episodes, and assuming that no other processes are operating, the errors generated by this sub-perceptual copying error will accumulate, although the accumulation rate will gradually slow down. On the other hand, if individuals tend to conform to the mean of the population at any given transmission episode, then the variation in the measurement concerned will reach an equilibrium level, with a range dependent on the strength of the conformity. The authors applied the theory to explaining variation in projectile point dimensions in the western US Owens Valley and in Illinois Woodland ceramic vessel diameters. They showed that drift was sufficient to explain the variation in projectile point thickness, but base width showed less variation than expected, so some biasing process leading to a reduction in variation over time must have been operating, while in the case of the pottery vessel diameters variation-increasing mechanisms were at work. Of course, in the absence of a framework that takes into account cultural transmission, such issues could not even be addressed.

However, the process of cultural transmission still needs embedding in a systemic context; it is not autonomous. Roux’s (2008) account of the apparently strange history of the production of wheel-fashioned pottery in the ancient Levant provides an excellent example to illustrate this as the situation at first sight seems rather puzzling: the production of wheel-fashioned pottery comes and goes twice before finally becoming permanently established. It is present in the late Chalcolithic period, disappears in the subsequent initial Early Bronze (EB) Age, appears again in EB III, disappears in EB IV, and finally takes off in the Middle Bronze Age. Roux locates the explanation in the context of the practice and transmission of the craft. For the Chalcolithic period a study of the petrology of the pottery and the techniques used to make it, as well as the contexts in which it was found, indicated that only a few individuals made the pottery, that they moved around, and that they were attached to elites. This restricted group of potters within which wheel coiling was transmitted was distinct from those much more numerous potters throughout the region who made the utilitarian pottery. The same is true of the EB III period in that wheel coiling was restricted to a small number of specialists whose potters’ turntables are found in palace contexts. The result in both periods was a technical system that Roux characterizes as fragile and closed.