Rada Varga, Carving a Professional Identity. The Occupational Epigraphy of the Latin West, Archaeopress Roman Archaeology 73, Oxford, Archaeopress, 2021, 119 P., Isbn 9781789694642

Pázsint, Annamária-Izabella

doi:10.14795/j.v8i1.592

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Notably, the availability of artefact images differs markedly across regions and time-slices. This is the consequence of practical scholarly constraints—resources for drawing and photography—and differences in research traditions and publication cultures, which sometimes assign differential value to imaging and drawing [ 138 ]. In some cases, this also reflects reporting biases (the selection of what artefacts to report at all) and representation biases (which artefacts to draw or photograph in a given research context).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A quantitative analysis of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy and evolution in Europe

Riede,

Matzig,

Biard

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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Archaeological systematics, together with spatial and chronological information, are commonly used to infer cultural evolutionary dynamics in the past. For the study of the Palaeolithic, and particularly the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic, proposed changes in material culture are often interpreted as reflecting historical processes, migration, or cultural adaptation to climate change and resource availability. Yet, cultural taxonomic practice is known to be variable across research history and academic traditions, and few large-scale replicable analyses across such traditions have been undertaken. Drawing on recent developments in computational archaeology, we here present a data-driven assessment of the existing Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy in Europe. Our dataset consists of a large expert-sourced compendium of key sites, lithic toolkit composition, blade and bladelet production technology, as well as lithic armatures. The dataset comprises 16 regions and 86 individually named archaeological taxa (‘cultures’), covering the period between ca. 15,000 and 11,000 years ago (cal BP). Using these data, we use geometric morphometric and multivariate statistical techniques to explore to what extent the dynamics observed in different lithic data domains (toolkits, technologies, armature shapes) correspond to each other and to the culture-historical relations of taxonomic units implied by traditional naming practice. Our analyses support the widespread conception that some dimensions of material culture became more diverse towards the end of the Pleistocene and the very beginning of the Holocene. At the same time, cultural taxonomic unit coherence and efficacy appear variable, leading us to explore potential biases introduced by regional research traditions, inter-analyst variation, and the role of disjunct macroevolutionary processes. In discussing the implications of these findings for narratives of cultural change and diversification across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, we emphasize the increasing need for cooperative research and systematic archaeological analyses that reach across research traditions.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%