An Introduction to Clustering with Applications to Archaeometry

Mucha, Hans‐Joachim; Bartel, Hans-Georg; Dolata, Jens; Morales-Merino, Carlos

doi:10.1201/b18530-14

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…New methods, such as geometric morphometrics, coupled with, for instance, cultural phylogenetics are offering innovative ways to construct archaeological taxonomies. Such cultural phylogenies represent hypotheses of historical patterns and processes (see O'Brien et al, 2008). They can be used to discriminate between divergent and convergent cultural evolution, and they offer ways of more formally and transparently defining nested cultural taxonomies.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

All these Fantastic Cultures? Research History and Regionalization in the Late Palaeolithic Tanged Point Cultures of Eastern Europe

Ivanovaitė¹,

Serwatka

Hoggard

et al. 2019

Eur. j. archaeol

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The Late Glacial, that is the period from the first pronounced warming after the Last Glacial Maximum to the beginning of the Holocene (c. 16,000-11,700 cal BP), is traditionally viewed as a time when northern Europe was being recolonized and Late Palaeolithic cultures diversified. These cultures are characterized by particular artefact types, or the co-occurrence or specific relative frequencies of these. In north-eastern Europe, numerous cultures have been proposed on the basis of supposedly different tanged points. This practice of naming new cultural units based on these perceived differences has been repeatedly critiqued, but robust alternatives have rarely been offered. Here, we review the taxonomic landscape of Late Palaeolithic large tanged point cultures in eastern Europe as currently envisaged, which leads us to be cautious about the epistemological validity of many of the constituent groups. This, in turn, motivates us to investigate the key artefact class, the large tanged point, using geometric morphometric methods. Using these methods, we show that distinct groups are difficult to recognize, with major implications for our understanding of patterns and processes of culture change in this period in north-eastern Europe and perhaps elsewhere.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

All these Fantastic Cultures? Research History and Regionalization in the Late Palaeolithic Tanged Point Cultures of Eastern Europe

Ivanovaitė¹,

Serwatka

Hoggard

et al. 2019

Eur. j. archaeol

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“…To provide a starting point-see point 2 above-we instructed PAUP * to root the trees with class KDR (our outgroup), which occurrence seriation had shown to be the oldest class . Within PAUP * , we used the heuristic search method in three separate runs of 100, 10,000, and 100,000 replicates (see details in O'Brien et al 2015a). Although this method is not guaranteed to identify a single globally optimal tree, it is the most computationally efficient method when dealing with large numbers of taxa.…”

Section: Cladisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For comparability, we have used the same suite of characters in many of our analyses of Paleoindian projectile points from eastern North America Darwent and O'Brien 2006;Eren et al 2015a;O'Brien et al 2015a, b). The eight characters are defined as follows, with individual character states shown in Fig.…”

Section: Units and Design Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We emphasize that our treatment of these topics is necessarily brief. Much of our work has been and will continue to be dedicated to exploring the issues in considerable detail, both generally (Bentley et al 2011a, b;O'Brien and Bentley 2011;Bentley et al 2014;Brock et al 2014) and specifically with respect to the design and manufacture of Clovis points across eastern North America O'Brien et al 2014;Boulanger et al 2015;Eren et al 2015a;O'Brien et al 2015a, b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Design Space and Cultural Transmission: Case Studies from Paleoindian Eastern North America

O’Brien

Boulanger

Buchanan

et al. 2015

J Archaeol Method Theory

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Tool design is a cultural trait-a term long used in anthropology as a unit of transmittable information that encodes particular behavioral characteristics of individuals or groups. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of a cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss, or partial alteration. Artifacts and other components of the archaeological record serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity in defining and measuring whatever it is that is being transmitted. Our interest here is in tool design, and we illustrate how to create analytical units that allow us to map tool-design space and to begin to understand how that space was used at different points in time. We first introduce the concept of fitness landscape and impose a model of cultural learning over it, then turn to four methods that are useful for the analysis of design space: paradigmatic classification, phylogenetic analysis, distance graphs, and geometric morphometrics. Each method builds on the others in logical fashion, which allows creation of testable hypotheses concerning cultural transmission and the evolutionary processes that shape it, including invention (mutation), selection, and drift. For examples, we turn to several case studies J Archaeol Method Theory

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“…Our evolutionary perspective considers morphological and technological characteristics of stone tools to be cultural traits, the patterning of which may represent cultural descent with modification when complemented by gradients of temporal and spatial archaeological context (3,17,18). This perspective informs our hypothesis of a phylogenetic relationship between Arctic and midcontinent fluted-point traditions.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Origins and spread of fluted-point technology in the Canadian Ice-Free Corridor and eastern Beringia

Smith

Goebel

2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Fluted projectile points have long been recognized as the archaeological signature of early humans dispersing throughout the Western Hemisphere; however, we still lack a clear understanding of their appearance in the interior "Ice-Free Corridor" of western Canada and eastern Beringia. To solve this problem, we conducted a geometric morphometric shape analysis and a phylogenetic analysis of technological traits on fluted points from the archaeological records of northern Alaska and Yukon, in combination with artifacts from further south in Canada, the Great Plains, and eastern United States to investigate the plausibility of historical relatedness and evolutionary patterns in the spread of fluted-point technology in the latest Pleistocene and earliest Holocene. Results link morphologies and technologies of Clovis, certain western Canadian, and northern fluted points, suggesting that fluting technology arrived in the Arctic from a proximate source in the interior Ice-Free Corridor and ultimately from the earliest populations in temperate North America, complementing new genomic models explaining the peopling of the Americas.

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An Introduction to Clustering with Applications to Archaeometry

Cited by 4 publications

References 47 publications

All these Fantastic Cultures? Research History and Regionalization in the Late Palaeolithic Tanged Point Cultures of Eastern Europe

All these Fantastic Cultures? Research History and Regionalization in the Late Palaeolithic Tanged Point Cultures of Eastern Europe

Design Space and Cultural Transmission: Case Studies from Paleoindian Eastern North America

Origins and spread of fluted-point technology in the Canadian Ice-Free Corridor and eastern Beringia

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