Perdiz arrow points from Caddo burial contexts aid in defining discrete behavioral regions

Abstract

Recent research into Caddo bottle and biface morphology yielded evidence for two distinct behavioral regions, across which material culture from Caddo burials expresses significant morphological differences. This study asks whether Perdiz arrow points from Caddo burials differ across the same geography, which would extend the pattern of morphological differences to a third category of Caddo material culture. Perdiz arrow points collected from the geographies of the northern and southern Caddo behavioral regions were employed to test the hypothesis that morphological attributes differ, and are predictable, between the two communities. The analysis of linear metrics indicated a significant difference in morphology by behavioral region. Using the linear metrics combined with the tools of machine learning, a predictive modelsupport vector machine-was designed to assess the degree to which community differences could be predicted, achieving a receiver operator curve score of 97 percent, and an accuracy score of 94 percent. The subsequent landmark geometric morphometric analysis identified significant differences in Perdiz arrow point shape and size between the behavioral regions-one characterized Components of the analytical workflow were developed and

Bayesian inference of material culture phylogenies using continuous traits: A birth–death model for Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age arrowheads from Northwestern Europe

“…Many archaeologists, especially those analysing stone artefacts, now reject typological approaches as overly subjective uncontrolled mixtures of technological and functional variables that often incorporate untested assumptions about the cognitive abilities and cultural organisation of hominins (see Bisson, 2000;Monnier and Missal, 2014;Riede et al, 2020Riede et al, , 2019Shea, 2014;Wilkins, 2020). In parallel with these critiques, archaeologists have been active developing accessible and reproducible methods for geometric morphometric analysis of artefacts (Cardillo and Charlin, 2018;Cortell-Nicolau et al, 2023;Ivanovaitė et al, 2020a;Matzig et al, 2021;Radinović and Kajtez, 2021;Selden and Dockall, 2023;Wang and Marwick, 2020). These morphometric studies often critique established typologies, accelerating the move towards population thinking in archaeology.…”