Confirmation of the role of geographic isolation by distance in among-tribe variations in beadwork designs and manufacture on the High Plains

Lycett, Stephen J.

doi:10.1007/s12520-018-0742-3

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…An exception was the most geographically restricted clan, the Plus-One clan, which spanned ∼1,000 km (the approximate annual home range of eastern tropical Pacific sperm whales) ( 29 , 30 ). Isolation by distance has been documented in culturally transmitted attributes of other species, such as human material culture (e.g., the beadwork patterns of High Plains ethnolinguistic tribes) ( 31 ) and red-faced cisticola ( Cisticola erythrops ) song ( 32 ). The observed decrease in coda usage similarity over space was steeper for nonidentity codas compared with identity codas, but this trend was not significant across all clans.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures

Hersh

Gero

Rendell

et al. 2022

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Culture, a pillar of the remarkable ecological success of humans, is increasingly recognized as a powerful force structuring nonhuman animal populations. A key gap between these two types of culture is quantitative evidence of symbolic markers—seemingly arbitrary traits that function as reliable indicators of cultural group membership to conspecifics. Using acoustic data collected from 23 Pacific Ocean locations, we provide quantitative evidence that certain sperm whale acoustic signals exhibit spatial patterns consistent with a symbolic marker function. Culture segments sperm whale populations into behaviorally distinct clans, which are defined based on dialects of stereotyped click patterns (codas). We classified 23,429 codas into types using contaminated mixture models and hierarchically clustered coda repertoires into seven clans based on similarities in coda usage; then we evaluated whether coda usage varied with geographic distance within clans or with spatial overlap between clans. Similarities in within-clan usage of both “identity codas” (coda types diagnostic of clan identity) and “nonidentity codas” (coda types used by multiple clans) decrease as space between repertoire recording locations increases. However, between-clan similarity in identity, but not nonidentity, coda usage decreases as clan spatial overlap increases. This matches expectations if sympatry is related to a measurable pressure to diversify to make cultural divisions sharper, thereby providing evidence that identity codas function as symbolic markers of clan identity. Our study provides quantitative evidence of arbitrary traits, resembling human ethnic markers, conveying cultural identity outside of humans, and highlights remarkable similarities in the distributions of human ethnolinguistic groups and sperm whale clans.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures

Hersh

Gero

Rendell

et al. 2022

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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In addition to the everyday practice of informal assessments of similarity, some studies have turned to quantitative methods to explore the relationship between geographic distance and similarity (i.e., density of particular artefact types, presence/absence of particular traits, etc.) for detecting structure of archaeological cultures (Renfrew, 1977;Kimes et al, 1982;Shennan et al, 2015;Lycett, 2019). Here, the premise is that groups in closer proximity to each other tend to interact and share knowledge more frequently than those farther apart (Johnson et al, 2006;Ross and Atkinson, 2016;Derungs et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time-dependent taphonomic site loss leads to spatial averaging: implications for archaeological cultures

Coco

Ioviţă

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Archaeologists typically define cultural areas on the basis of similarities between the types of material culture present in sites. The similarity is assessed in order of discovery, with newer sites being evaluated against older ones. Despite evidence for historical winnowing where the number of discoverable sites declines with increased time depth due to taphonomic bias, little attention has been paid to how this impacts archaeological interpretations about the spatial extents of material culture similarity. This paper tests the hypothesis that spatial averaging as a result of spatially incomplete datasets results in larger regions of similarity. In order to avoid assumptions of cultural processes, we apply subsampling algorithms to a naturally occurring, spatially distributed dataset of soil types. We calculate how distances to the minimum values in similarity between data points change as smaller percentages of the total dataset are used to construct distance decay curves. We show that there is a negative relationship between the percentage of points used to evaluate similarity across space and the absolute distances to the first minimum in similarity for soil classifications at multiple spatial scales. This negative relationship indicates that incomplete spatial datasets lead to an overestimation of the area over which things are similar. Moreover, the location of the point from which the calculation begins can determine the size of the region of similarity. This has important implications for how we interpret the spatial extent of similarity in material culture over large distances in prehistory.

show abstract

Spatially mediated cultural transmission and the distribution of horse blanket styles among post-contact and reservation-period tribes of western North America

Lycett

2020

Archaeol Anthropol Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Confirmation of the role of geographic isolation by distance in among-tribe variations in beadwork designs and manufacture on the High Plains

Cited by 6 publications

References 48 publications

Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures

Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures

Time-dependent taphonomic site loss leads to spatial averaging: implications for archaeological cultures

Spatially mediated cultural transmission and the distribution of horse blanket styles among post-contact and reservation-period tribes of western North America

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About