History Written in Stone: Evolutionary Analysis of Stone Tools in Archeology

Abstract

Populations of living things evolve over time, but do other things? Evolution involves transmission, be it of genes, ideas, or designs. What is transmitted, how and by whom, influences tempo and mode of evolution. In recent years, archeologists have applied evolutionary logic and processes to their study of things made and used by ancient people. Despite differences in subject units and in modes and patterns of transmission, evolutionary processes and the transmission modes that accompany them are worth seeking in archeological data. Stone spear points are abundant in the archeological record, yet we lack a theory to explain the creation, duration, and divergence of point types. Evolutionary studies of New World Late Pleistocene Paleoindian points are a step toward such theory, but limit the form of data and the evolutionary processes considered. An alternative in the study of Paleoindian points is geometric morphometric methods that do not constrain how point size and form are characterized nor assume branching divergence between taxa. Evolutionism should not dominate archeology, but it should become a major area of research within the field.Keywords Points . Evolution . Geometric morphometrics Archeology is a thing of cycles. Nineteenth century archeology cycled between ordering past time, exemplified in Thomsen's Three-Age system, function or adaption, and metaphysical evolutionism (Trigger 1996:121-138, 315-384). Culture history arose anew early in the twentieth century. Then mid-century processualists invoked function to explain patterns of evidence. More recently still, culture history returned, clad in the armor of dual-inheritance theory and brandishing a cladistic lance. This incarnation denies much role to function yet severely constrains social process; it is culture history on mathematical steroids. For nearly two centuries, then, archeology has cycled between history, function, and evolution.In each cycle, the dominant view largely precluded or denied alternatives; the archeological record was evidence either of passing style, function, or progressive evolution, rarely of all in complex interaction. As a result, archeology's intellectual history is a chronicle of cycling fads, not steady progress. We keep exploring only to arrive where we started, but never knowing the place any better. Unresolved cycling imparts a Manichaean quality to archeological thought, a tendency to advocate views categorically opposed to others rather than to reconcile or integrate them.It may be time for new approaches. Archeology should consider at once the roles of history, function, and evolution in the trajectories of change in past cultures and their components. Doing so requires new theory that Clarke (1968) adumbrated but that remains badly underdeveloped (Shott 2010a) and methods that are new, at least to archeology. This paper argues that archeology should consider an evolutionary approach to the study of artifact lineages that are common in the material record. That approach requires some new theory, whos...

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