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

Abstract

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 J Archaeol Method Theory

Cultural learning and the Clovis colonization of North America

“…This phenomenon occurs in other aspects of culture as well. In a study of projectile points from eastern North America that immediately postdate Clovis, including a large sample from the northeast, Gingerich et al 74 found increasing variation in bifacial flake-scar symmetry, which was not the case in the Clovis-only study of Sholts et al 47 The resulting regionalization in the east 31,42,71,73,113,118 shows up in morphologically distinct, fully fluted, basally thinned, and unfluted forms, with subregional variants, including types such as Barnes, Beaver Lake, Bull Brook, Crowfield, Cumberland, Dalton, Debert/Vail, Quad, Redstone, San Patrice, Suwannee, Simpson, and some lanceolate shapes that resemble points from the Great Plains. In contrast, design and manufacture in the east were tied to two tiers of social learning, one tied to conformist transmission of ancestral tool-making processes-flake removal-and the other a product of drift and, perhaps to some extent, regional adaptation-shape.…”

“…The dichotomous intraregional results from the upper midwest strongly suggest that Clovis foragers engaged in two tiers of social learning. 71 The lower, ancestral tier relates to point production and can be tied to conformist transmission of ancestral tool-making processes across the larger North American Clovis population. 47 In other words, dispersing Clovis groups were still socially connected across large regions of North America and directly transmitting technological knowledge to each other, resulting in low interregional variation in how points were being flaked.…”

“…But GM analysis also showed distinct differences in point shape associated with the stone outcrop from which particular Clovis points originated.The dichotomous intraregional results from the upper midwest strongly suggest that Clovis foragers engaged in two tiers of social learning 71. Most flake-scar contours, irrespective of the region from which the points come, cluster in the center of the diagram.…”

“…,50 Colonizing populations do not necessarily stay in constant contact with one another, especially as geographic distance between them increases. In other words, different local fitness peaks are being explored 71. Similarly, colonizing populations may begin to adapt point shape to the environmental conditions they encounter, which differ from those encountered by other groups.…”

“…In other words, different local fitness peaks are being explored. 71 What about technological aspects of point production that do not influence variation in shape? Several researchers have proposed that Clovis points were made with similar production techniques, irrespective of geographic locality, 34,72,73 but only recently has this proposal been subjected to quantitative analysis.…”