Cultural Transmission Theory and the Archaeological Record: Providing Context to Understanding Variation and Temporal Changes in Material Culture

Abstract

Cultural transmission (CT) is implicit in many explanations of culture change. Formal CT models were defined by anthropologists 30 years ago and have been a subject of active research in the social sciences in the ensuing years. Although increasing in popularity in recent years, CT has not seen extensive use in archaeological research, despite the quantitative rigor of many CT models and the ability to create testable hypotheses. Part of the reason for the slow adoption, we argue, has been the continuing focus on change in central tendency and mode in archaeology, instead of change in dispersion or variance. Yet archaeological research provides an excellent data source for exploring processes of CT. We review CT research in the anthropological sciences and outline the benefits and drawbacks of this theoretical framework for the study of material culture. We argue that CT can shed much light on our understandings of why material technology changes over time, including explanations of differential rates of change among different technologies. We further argue that transmission processes are greatly affected by the content, context, and mode of transmission and fundamentally structure variation in material culture. Including ideas from CT can provide greater context for explaining and understanding changes in the variation of artifacts over time. Finally, we outline what we feel should be the goals of CT research in archaeology in the coming years.

Population structure and cultural geography of a folktale in Europe

“…Much has been made of analogies between processes of biological and cultural evolution and the potential for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. While there exist important disanalogies between cultural and biological processes, particularly with regard to micro-evolutionary transmission mechanisms [33,59], our findings suggest that methods and theory from population genetics can nonetheless be usefully applied to characterize population structure and variation in cultural packages such as folktales.…”

“…In addition, the location information from individual folktale variants allowed us to tease apart the relative effects of population structure and geography on cultural diversity. Future work using the approach we describe here could examine how these patterns differ across other aspects of human culture, such as variation in material culture assemblages through time in the archaeological record [6], providing important insights into processes of cultural transmission and the interplay between human genetic and cultural evolution. …”

On Vastness and Variability: Cultural Transmission, Historicity, and the Paleoindian Record in Eastern South America

“…Additionally, South American data can contribute to the refining of CT theory, since the empirical evidence we have surely poses some interesting problems. As proposed by Eerkens and Lipo (2007), it is important not only to borrow concepts from CT theory, but also to try to see if particular archaeological cases can have a role in theory building.…”

Lessons from ‘archaeotecture’: Analysing variations in vernacular architecture using methods from archaeology

“…It is now commonly referred to as cultural transmission with several theories developed around this concept. The main difference being that while diffusionists focused only on change, transmissionists expanded their research into rates of change, rates of error, conditions that affect the varying rates of change and different transmission mechanisms (Eerkens and Lipo, 2007).…”