Self-Organized Cultural Cycles and the Uncertainty of Archaeological Thought

Abstract

Contributing to the issue of complex relationship between social and cultural evolution, this paper aims to analyze repetitive patterns, or cycles, in the development of material culture. Our analysis focuses on culture change associated with sociopolitical and economic stasis. The proposed toy model describes the cyclical character of the quantitative and qualitative composition of archaeological assemblages, which include hierarchically organized cultural traits. Cycles sequentially process the stages of unification, diversity, and return to unification. This complex dynamic behavior is caused by the ratio between cultural traits’ replication rate and the proportion of traits of the higher taxonomic order’s related unit. Our approach identifies a shift from conformist to anti-conformist transmission, corresponding with open and closed phases in cultural evolution in respect to the introduction of innovations. The model also describes the dependence of a probability for horizontal transmission upon orders of taxonomic hierarchy during open phases. The obtained results are indicative for gradual cultural evolution at the low orders of taxonomic hierarchy and punctuated evolution at its high orders. The similarity of the model outcomes to the patters of material culture change reflecting societal transformations enables discussions around the uncertainty of explanation in archaeology and anthropology.

Entropology: an information-theoretic approach to understanding archaeological data

“…Patterns represented by the rise and fall in diversity (i.e., uni cation -diversity -uni cation patterns according to are expected to be found in a range of datasets from different areas and time periods. As we said, such repetitive patterns may or may not re ect social transformations i.e., re ective cycles vs. self-organized cycles respectively (Diachenko & Sobkowiak-Tabaka, 2022). In this paper we explore the extent to which our LBA Cretan dataset opens itself to a similar analysis.…”

“…We argue that these data changes may permit a 'translation' of these patterns of culture change, albeit partial and distorted because of data limitations. Changes in data patterns may re ect social transformations (re ective cycles) (e.g., or may not (self-organized cycles) (Diachenko & Sobkowiak-Tabaka, 2022). In case of the latter, we are thinking more along the lines of changes in fashion than a revolution, although it is quite possible that both tendencies are present.…”

“…On unpicking the data, in large part this re ects the replacement of sphero-conical vessels and craters by biconical and crater-shaped vessels. Upon this overall nearly sigmoid-shaped pro le local deviations in diversity in time units 4, 6, and 9 correspond to immigration of the population groups from the west to the Southern Bug and Dnieper inter uve(Diachenko et al, 2020;Diachenko & Sobkowiak-Tabaka, 2022).The homogeneity of the WTC assemblages suggests the intensive interactions between populations of different sites and positive frequency-dependent cultural transmission (a fashion spread). The latter statement nds its conformation in the distribution of vessel shapes in WTC beyond the analysed region (e.g.,Markevich, 1981;Ryzhov, 2021).…”