This paper was prepared for the SAA2019 conference in Albuquerque, NM, USA. The relevant session Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record by Ben Marwick took place on 12/04/2019.
The now classic Neiman (1995) is a baseline for many influential applications of Cultural Transmission to explore Stylistic Variability in archaeology. It and many of its successors represent social interaction and generational development in a deliberately simplified way to facilitate the exploration of parameters and algebraic analysis. While justified, this omits both the theoretical trajectories of information transmission elaborated by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) as well as the insights archaeologists have gained through social network analysis.
This paper explores an alternative, agent-based simulation framework that attempts to be more flexible: a diachronic population graph is established as a landscape, in which ideas as entities with individual agency seek expansion -- the meme's eye view. The social network can be constructed to represent archaeological knowledge concerning population size development, the degree of intra- and intergroup exchange or spatial or cultural patterns of interaction. Ideas may be long-term static or evolving over time, selectively neutral or functionally different, distributed randomly or according to real world examples.
Population graph generation and idea expansion simulation are implemented in R and C++ and accessible with an R interface -- but computationally expensive. The presentation will elaborate on the concept and show an example application.
Neiman, F. D. (1995). Stylistic Variation in Evolutionary Perspective: Inferences from Decorative Diversity and Interassemblage Distance in Illinois Woodland Ceramic Assemblages. American Antiquity, 60(1), 7–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/282074
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution: a quantitative approach. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.