IRFP: Cultural Transmission and Phylogenetic Inference in Material Culture

Scholnick Jonathan B, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Jonathan Scholnick to work with Dr. Mark Collard at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. This project investigates the evolution of cultural traditions in the workshops that produced historical New England gravestones. Many of these artifacts, still standing in burial grounds, are associated with individual carvers through the archival record. The lineages of these gravestone carvers and their workshop affiliations are compared with the decorative techniques to trace the transmission of culture. This study adds to our understanding of the emergence of material culture traditions through social learning of individual craft producers, particularly linking cultural transmission between individuals to population-level cultural traditions. This project will also refine our understanding of material culture diversity of the time-averaged assemblages that archaeologists commonly study. Recently, biological methods of inferring family trees from an organism's genetic or phenotypic traits have been applied to culture, particularly artifacts and language. Like biology, the aim is to learn about the historic events that account population level cultural diversity, including natural selection, and migration. Since the transmission of cultural behaviors in some ways resembles the way that genes are passed from parent to child, a suite of cultural transmission models have been adapted from population genetics. Culture, however, can be acquired via more diverse and complicated set of pathways. These departures present a challenge to anthropology and other fields that are actively using these cultural evolutionary principles.