Living in remote places can strain the adaptive capacities of human settlers. It can also protect communities from external social, political and economic forces. In this paper, we present an archaeological population history of the Kuril Islands. This string of small volcanic islands on the margins of the Northwest Pacific was occupied by maritime hunting, fishing and gathering communities from the mid-Holocene to recent centuries. We bring together (1) 380 new and previously published archaeological radiocarbon dates, (2) a new paleodemographic model based on a radiocarbon-timestamped temporal frequency distribution of archaeological deposits, (3) recently published paleoclimate trends, and (4) recently published archaeological proxy evidence for changes in the extent of social networks. We demonstrate that, over the last two millennia, inhabitants of the Kuril Islands underwent dramatic demographic fluctuations. Explanations of these fluctuations are considered in the context of environmental hazards, social networks and the emergence of an East Asian “World System”, elucidating the tension between local and external adaptive strategies to social and ecological uncertainty. Results suggest that population resilience to local climate and environmental variability was achieved by virtue of social networks that maintained non-local support in times of crisis. Conversely, the expansion of the East Asian political economy into neighboring regions of the southern margin of the Kuril Islands perhaps in conjunction with exposure to epidemic diseases appears to have undermined the adaptive strategies, resulting in an increase in the vulnerability of Kuril populations to environmental fluctuations.

Network analysis using hunter-gatherer archaeological data presents a number of unique challenges. At the forefront of these challenges are issues associated with the aggregation and fragmentation of archaeological data that influence the size, density and confidence in network models. These methodological challenges are unfortunate, as the diverse roles of social networks among hunter-gatherers have long been recognized within anthropological research. In order to enhance the research potential of networks constructed from hunter-gatherer archaeological data, this research highlights two data evaluation methods established in social science research to assess the stability of network structure. More specifically, this research constructs network models from the compositional analysis of ceramic artifacts recovered in the Kuril Islands of Northeast Asia and evaluates network centrality measures using bootstrap simulation and sensitivity analysis. Results of this research suggest that while archaeologists may never fully identify the "true" network of past relationships, network models that approximate "true" network structure can provide useful metrics in exploring the behavior of past hunter-gatherer populations. Overall, given the challenges associated with hunter-gatherer archaeological data, it is argued here that critically evaluating the structure and stability of network models is an essential first step in developing an archaeological network analysis that is relevant and informative to research on past small-scale societies.

One of the most remarkable aspects of our species is that while we show surprisingly little genetic diversity, we demonstrate astonishing amounts of cultural diversity. Perhaps most impressive is the diversity of our technologies, broadly defined as all the physical objects we produce and the skills we use to produce them. Despite considerable focus on the evolution of technology by social scientists and philosophers, there have been few attempts to systematically quantify technological diversity, and therefore the dynamics of technological change remain poorly understood. Here we show a novel Bayesian model for examining technological diversification adopted from palaeontological analysis of occurrence data. We use this framework to estimate the tempo of diversification in American car and truck models produced between 1896 and 2014, and to test the relative importance of competition and extrinsic factors in shaping changes in macro-evolutionary rates. Our results identify a four-fold decrease in the origination and extinction rates of car models, and a negative net diversification rate over the last 30 years. We also demonstrate that competition played a more significant role in car model diversification than either changes in oil prices or gross domestic product. Together our analyses provide a set of tools that can enhance current research on technological and cultural evolution by providing a flexible and quantitative framework for exploring the dynamics of diversification.

is a premier research organization dedicated to the creation, dissemination, and conservation of archaeological knowledge and heritage. It is home to both the Interdepartmental Archaeology Graduate Program and the UCLA/ Getty Master's Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials. The Cotsen Institute provides a forum for innovative faculty research, graduate education, and public programs at UCLA in an effort to positively impact the academic, local and global communities. Established in 1973, the Cotsen Institute is at the forefront of archaeological research, education, conservation and publication and is an active contributor to interdisciplinary research at UCLA. The Cotsen Institute Press specializes in producing high-quality academic volumes in several different series, including Monographs, World Heritage and Monuments, Cotsen Advanced Seminars, and Ideas, Debates and Perspectives. The Press is committed to making the fruits of archaeological research accessible to professionals, scholars, students, and the general public. We are able to do this through the generosity of Lloyd E. Cotsen, longtime Institute volunteer and benefactor, who has provided an endowment that allows us to subsidize our publishing program and produce superb volumes at an affordable price. Publishing in nine different series, our award-winning archaeological publications receive critical acclaim in both the academic and popular communities.

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Questions about the evolution of material culture are widespread in the humanities and social sciences. Statistical modeling of long-term changes in material culture is less common due to a lack of appropriate frameworks. Our goal is to close this gap and provide robust statistical methods for examining changes in the diversity of material culture. We provide an open-source and quantitative workflow for estimating rates of origination, extinction, and preservation, as well as identifying key shift points in the diversification histories of material culture. We demonstrate our approach using two distinct kinds of data: age ranges for the production of American car models, and radiocarbon dates associated with archaeological cultures of the European Neolithic. Our approach improves on existing frameworks by disentangling the relative contributions of origination and extinction to diversification. Our method also permits rigorous statistical testing of competing hypotheses to explain changes in diversity. Finally, we stress the value of a flexible approach that can be applied to data in various forms; this flexibility allows scholars to explore commonalities between forms of material culture and ask questions about the general properties of cultural change.

Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.

The Circumpolar North is generally recognized as a challenging environment to inhabit and yet, we know relatively little about how people managed their welfare in these places. Here, we add to the understanding of maritime hunter-gatherers in the subarctic North Pacific through a comparative approach that synthesizes biogeographic and archaeological data from the Kuril Islands. We conclude that our faunal, ceramic and lithic evidence support biogeographical expectations as assemblages from low biodiversity and insular regions show limited diet breadth, more locally produced pottery and a conservation of lithic resources. However, we highlight that these ecological factors did not strictly determine the occupation history of the archipelago as radiocarbon data suggests all regions experienced similar demographic fluctuations regardless of their biogeography. These results imply additional pressures influenced the strategic use and settlement of the Kuril Islands and the need for increased chronological resolution to disentangle these complex historical factors. IntroductionMaritime hunter-gatherers can be broadly defined as those groups whose subsistence relies primarily on wild resources extracted from the sea. However, given that many northern regions have had only intermittent human presence (Hoffecker 2005; Friesen and Mason 2016) and have been less intensively studied, the archaeological record of Arctic and sub-Arctic maritime hunter-gatherers is often scant. This is unfortunate as the archaeology of northern foragers present valuable opportunities to study long-term interactions between humans and their environments. This is especially true given the challenging climates, inherent instability of highlatitude ecosystems and their reliance on local resources for survival (Damm et al. 2019). Here, our approach is to compare archaeological and radiocarbon evidence from maritime hunter-gatherers that inhabited a subarctic landscape: the Kuril Islands, an archipelago that stretches from the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido to the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula (see Fig 1). We start from the well-established premise that islands make good areas for studying historical hunter-gatherer relationships to ecological variability (Keegan