Design Space and Cultural Transmission: Case Studies from Paleoindian Eastern North America

Tool design is a cultural trait—a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss, or partial alteration. Artifacts and other components of the archaeological record serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity in defining and measuring whatever it is that is being transmitted. Our interest here is in tool design, and we illustrate how to create analytical units that allow us to map tool-design space and to begin to understand how that space was used at different points in time. We first introduce the concept of fitness landscape and impose a model of cultural learning over it, then turn to four methods that are useful for the analysis of design space: paradigmatic classification, phylogenetic analysis, distance graphs, and geometric morphometrics. Each method builds on the others in logical fashion, which allows creation of testable hypotheses concerning cultural transmission and the evolutionary processes that shape it, including invention (mutation), selection, and drift. For examples, we turn to several case studies that focus on Early Paleoindian–period projectile points from eastern North America, the earliest widespread and currently recognizable remains of hunter–gatherers in late Pleistocene North America.     

Mapping the arts: industry concentrations,distribution, and change in the US, 1980–2010

This paper studies arts industries in all 366 US metropolitan statistical areas between 1980 and 2010. Our analysis provides evidence that the arts are an important component of many regional economies, but also highlights their volatility. After radical growth and diffusion between 1980 and 2000, in the last decade, the arts industries are defined more by shrinkage and reconcentration in fewer metropolitan areas. Further, we find that the vast majority of metros have strengths in particular sets of arts industries. As we discuss in the conclusion, these conditions present challenges and opportunities for urban cultural policy that goes beyond the current focus on the arts as consumption amenities.     

Reply to the comments

The question of when and how fanning was introduced in the north of Norway has for decades been entangled with the hypothesis of a teutonic immigration in the Early Iron Age. New evidence ‐ mainly pollen analytical results ‐ takes away the basis for the immigration hypothesis. Both animal husbandry and barley growing originate in the neolithic periods. Although artifacts and intentional deposits of south Scandinavian types are comparatively few, important parallels are seen with Hordaland, west Norway, especially in the late Middle Neolithic Period. In the establishment and early development of farming in the North no doubt diffusional processes were at work, but small scale immigrations may also have occurred.     

Comments on relative chronology

Post‐Processualism's influence is waning in Britain, linked to the decline of its parent Post‐Modernism. Both lost credibility through attempting to dominate discourse, and their negative implications for human rights. Modernism and its offspring Processualism had reflected the scientism and socio‐economic centralism that dominated the 20th century up until the 1970s. Jameson and Harvey have exposed their Post‐Modernism as a superficial aesthetic movement spawned by Post‐Fordist economics. Perceived from the History of Ideas this temporal succession is the recurrent opposition between Positivist and Idealist philosophies. Wittgenstein's philosophy shows a ‘third way’ where objective and subjective approaches are complementary tools for scholarship. In Cognitive Processual archaeology a pragmatic merger arises from these formerly competing traditions.     

A practical and statistical approach to some flake measuring problems

In this article, the hypotheses put forward in ‘A Theoretical Approach’ in Volume 1 of this Journal are tested. An account is first given of the additional settlements and hoards which were treated in the computer. The combined material consists of 17 units. The material is then evaluated and handled in a number of experiments in which various methods of arriving at special tendencies in the material are considered. Finally the various methods selected are discussed and the results summarised.