Inferring cultural reproduction from lithic data: A critical review

Abstract

The cultural reproduction of lithic technology, long an implicit assumption of archaeological theories, has garnered increasing attention over the past decades. Major debates ranging from the origins of the human culture capacity to the interpretation of spatiotemporal patterning now make explicit reference to social learning mechanisms and cultural evolutionary dynamics. This burgeoning literature has produced important insights and methodological innovations. However, this rapid growth has sometimes led to confusion and controversy due to an under-examination of underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions. The time is thus ripe for a critical assessment of progress in the study of the cultural reproduction of lithic technology. Here we review recent work addressing the evolutionary origins of human culture and the meaning of artifact variation at both intra-site and inter-site levels. We propose that further progress will require a more extended and context-specific evolutionary approach to address the complexity of real-world cultural reproduction.

Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience

“…Research in cognitive science already has a long history of interdisciplinarity upon which to build in the study of collective intelligence. For example, models of population genetics originating in biology have been applied to cultural evolution (Liu & Stout, 2022), models originating in statistical mechanics, such as the Ising model, have been applied to collective behavior and brain dynamics (Kozhin, 2022), and models originating in classical mechanics, such as coupledoscillator models, have been applied to the study of individual behavior, joint-action, and neural activity alike (Kelso, 2021). We suggest that an explicit recognition of the shared mechanisms of intelligence behavior across scales may facilitate discovery at all of the scales.…”

Tourism and education intersection: cultural reproduction of Osing community in the Angklung Caruk music festival

“…(1) the process of domination and subordination in cultural dynamics at the social level and (2) the process of resistance in the reproduction of cultural identity by a group of people at the individual level [27].…”

“…At this point, the initial assumption of this research emerged that the Angklung Caruk Festival was a cultural reproduction of Osing music in the era of modern industrialization. Cultural reproduction is a process where the 'origin' culture is represented in a new environment [27]. This representation process requires cultural capital, including those related to heredity, family, and environment [28].…”

The dual role of culture for reconstructing early sapiens cognition.

“…Approaches in cognitive archeology (for overviews, see A. Currie & Killin, 2019; Overmann & Coolidge, 2019) and evolutionary psychology (Confer et al, 2010; Cosmides & Tooby, 2013) extrapolate from present-day cognition to the abilities of our ancestors, based on often thoughtful strategies and protocols such as reverse engineering of cognitive skills (Haidle, 2010; C. Liu & Stout, 2023; Sellet, 1993), more recently combined with neuroscientific studies (Mellet et al, 2019; Stout & Chaminade, 2007).…”