Robert C. Dunnell’s "Systematics in Prehistory" at 50

Abstract

Systematics in Prehistory. At the height of the debate between Culture History and New Archaeology, Dunnell’s work sought to address a more fundamental issue that was and still is relevant to all branches of prehistoric archaeology, and especially to the study of the Palaeolithic: systematics. Dunnell himself was notorious and controversial, however, but the importance of his work remains underappreciated. Like other precocious works of that tumultuous time Systematics in Prehistory today remains absent from most course reading lists and gathers dust on library shelves. In this contribution we argue for a greater appreciation of its as yet unfulfilled conceptual and analytical promise. In particular, we briefly chart its somewhat delayed impact via evolutionary archaeology, including how it has also influenced non-Anglophone traditions, especially in South America. The obstinate persistence of classification issues in palaeoanthropology and palaeoarchaeology, we argue, warrants a second look at Dunnell’s Systematics.

A macroevolutionary analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool shape using a Bayesian phylodynamic framework

“…Archaeology is another human science in which phylogenetic analysis has gained some traction in the last decades. Spurred by the development of, initially, the notion of the extended phenotype and later the emergence of cultural evolutionary theory [15,16], archaeologists have adopted phylogenetic methods to model and understand artefact evolution [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Yet, artefacts can be described in many ways and archaeologists have devised countless, often not readily compatible qualitative and quantitative ways of doing so.…”

“…D shows the lengths of the 95% Highest Posterior Density (HPD) interval of the node heights. In sub-plots a, the data is shown for each trait (y-axis), grouped by the number of taxa(16,32,60, 87). In b, the plot shows all values separated by taxa, summarising the values across traits.…”