Transcript
Speaker: You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Flipside. This is, as always, the podcast that brings to you important discussions about the past prompted by specific historical events. This month, I'm joined by Professor Steven Shannon, who is a professor of theoretical archaeology at UCL Institute of Archaeology.
Speaker: Professor Shennan has specific research period interests in Neolithic and Bronze Age prehistory, specifically of Europe. And most importantly for this podcast since the late 1980s has a research interest focused on exploring the use of method and theory from the study of biological evolution to understand cultural stability.
Speaker: and archaeological -slash -sociocultural change as an evolutionary process. One of Professor Shannon's most recent publications was in the Quaternary International Journal and was a neolithic population model based on new radiocarbon dates from mining, funerary and population -scaled activity in the Saint -Gond -Marches region of northeast France.
Speaker: In regard to this episode, this article is particularly pertinent because it is an example of how evolutionary theory can be used to help model archaeological scenarios with a particularly useful focus on population modeling.
Speaker: As a particular expert on evolutionary theory in archaeology, we are delighted that Professor Shennan agreed to speak with us today. So I guess now you wonderful listeners want to know what inspired this month's episode. And truly this time, this month's event is one I am sure you will have heard of. And that is the 162nd anniversary of Charles Darwin publishing on the origin of species.
Speaker: on the 24th of November 1859. This text is pretty important as it's considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. It introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through the process of natural selection, diversity arising out of common descent through the process of adaption.
Speaker: Whilst we have moved on from Darwin's theory of evolution in its purest form, it still provides the unifying concept for all life sciences, and many of its principles still provide the foundations for studies in development. Without further ado, let's begin our questioning with perhaps the broadest but most important foundation question
Speaker: of what place does evolutionary theory occupy in archaeological research and discussion? Okay, I think it's fair to say that as you imply, it's particularly in this country and Europe, it's relatively minor.
Speaker: and doesn't have a very large place. I think that's a bit different in North America and in some places in South America as well. But I think perhaps the first thing to do is to start by saying that what I mean by evolution
Speaker: is not about kind of progress from bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states and so on, or about growing social complexity. What I mean by it is this idea that Darwin actually used a descent with modification.
Speaker: So, particular things are passed down, and then in response to various forces, those things which are passed down gradually change, or in some cases not so gradually change. So, for a theory to be evolutionary, as it were, in my sense, it has to have three different elements.
Speaker: So it has to have mechanisms for the generation of new things. So in biology, that's a mutation, OK? But in the case of culture, it's innovation. So the appearance of new kinds of artifacts, for example, that would be the generation of novelty of new things. And then very important is the idea of transmission of things being passed on.
Speaker: So in biological evolution, then obviously the passing on is of genes during reproduction. Whereas in culture, the passing on is of ways to do things, from farming methods, to pot making, to ways to bring up children. And all these things are passed on in various ways by social learning. So people learn things from one another.
Speaker: And the thing about the modes of cultural transmission is that they're much more varied than the modes of genetic transmission. So some people, for example, teachers can pass on their knowledge to a whole class full of children.
Speaker: and particular people, perhaps prestigious people, can have a great deal of influence on what is transmitted, what is passed on. And those kinds of processes don't exist with regard to kind of genetic transmission. And then the third thing that's needed is mechanisms that affect what is transmitted. So in the case of genes, it's essentially natural selection and drift
Speaker: which is the process of random change. Those things also operate in regard to cultural features, but there's a much greater variety of selective mechanisms in cultural features. So, for example, you can have social selection. So, for example, practices, let's say, that have been acceptable for generations disappear because they're not acceptable in new social conditions, they get rejected.
Speaker: And likewise, certain things can get strongly selected and become very frequent because they're more prestigious to a certain group of people. So all those things can modify what gets passed on.
Speaker: And then lastly, in the modern evolutionary theory, we have this idea of niche construction. The idea here is that people, and in fact other species as well, have a role in changing their own environments. And in turn, those changes in their environments that people make then have an impact on the choices people make in the next generation.
Speaker: So those are the different things which I see as kind of components of a kind of evolutionary theory in archaeology. So you mentioned niche construction and I'd quite like to ask you a question about that actually. From my understanding, human niche construction and niche construction theory is particularly non -contentious in terms of people acknowledging its existence.
Speaker: But there are two issues that I can think of that have been spoken about in literature. The first being that niche construction is an evolutionary process, and the second, the application of human niche construction to the origins of agriculture within archaeology specifically. I'm very intrigued as to what your interpretation is on that
Speaker: Some people say that it's unnecessary, that people have always recognised, even Darwin recognised that earthworms changed their environment by the process of making the soil and so on.
Speaker: What I think is useful about it is that it recognises these kinds of feedback processes between what people do, the impacts that have on their environment, but then the point is that the new environment will have impact back on what people do and very often what people do.
Speaker: leads to kind of unintended changes or in the environment. And then those unintended changes have an impact on, let's say, the kinds of challenges people have to cope with in the following generation.
Speaker: So I think it's useful also because even a lot of people who are rather skeptical of evolutionary theory, like the notion of niche construction, it's a kind of common ground notion, I think, which a lot of people can see is useful, even if they attach perhaps slightly different meanings to it, if that makes sense.
Speaker: I suppose then human niche construction represents a theory which really aids in identifying dynamic interactions between the constructor of a niche and their cause and effect within a landscape or environment.
Speaker: So in that respect a niche would never truly be constructed as it's an endless, dynamic, holistic process of environment affectation and equally has a facet in terms of defining the identity of the niche construct which I suppose brings me to the inverse question of the one I've already asked you which is
Speaker: What does archaeology itself bring to discussions on human evolution, or equally, discussions based on cultural transmission or development?
Speaker: The thing about archaeology is, of course, it's the only discipline that provides a long -term history of human action and its material dimensions, including its impact on environments. And no other discipline has that. In terms of the detail, let's say, of how past communities
Speaker: led their lives. I think we probably know, because of detailed archaeology, let's say, far more in detail about life in, let's say, a Swiss lake village from 3000 BC than we do about the average English village in the 19th century AD, because we have that very detailed material information.
Speaker: and say no other discipline provides that. And I think without it, we can't really understand these broader changes in society and the
Speaker: and the role of evolutionary theory. So I think evolutionary theory has something to offer archaeology, but archaeology offers that long -term perspective and enables you to test different ideas about how cultures changed in the past, and that's not provided by anybody else.
Speaker: Archaeology really is beneficial in that sense because having a tangible example to explain changes in cultural identity or in agricultural or environmental practice or in any aspect
Speaker: of human society actually is really useful because of course we can explain these changes and we can identify them but having solid evidence there not only aids the researcher but also anyone who comes into contact with this research after including members of the public
Speaker: who we have now a duty to curate accessible data towards. Apart from that, it's certainly not the only way, but I think it is one of the best ways employing evolutionary theory in archaeology to explain interconnectivity between communities, whether that is in regards to trade or whether it's in regards to shared environment or whether it's in regards to cultural developments.
Speaker: It's certainly not the only way to explain interconnectivity but it is a really good way to help visualise communal interactions and predict potential cause and effect of those actions. I want to go back a bit here. I'm just looking at the notes I made in preparation and I think I've seen a couple of points in relation to your first question that perhaps I'd like to say a little bit more about if that's okay. So I think one strength about evolutionary theory
Speaker: is that it provides a framework for integrating ideas from a whole range of disciplines. So from experimental psychology and animal behavior studies, through to different kinds of anthropology and ecology and economics, all these things kind of feed in to evolutionary theory. And archaeologists, for example,
Speaker: can gain insights from, let's say, the studies of imitation by babies in psychological laboratories, for example, and looking at how babies learn. And that kind of thing, I think, can inform us about, again, usefully, giving us kind of tools for thought in terms of how people might have learned in prehistory and how we might interpret changes that we see.
Speaker: So that was one of the points which I'd kind of forgotten from my notes that I've forgotten to mention. The other aspect which I think is worth saying is that there are kind of two distinct research traditions in evolutionary archaeology and one of them is the one I've mainly talked about. It's centered on cultural transmission and dual inheritance theory.
Speaker: So this is the idea that humans, on the one hand, they have a genetic inheritance, but they also have a cultural inheritance. And the two kind of don't, certainly don't altogether coincide with one another. There's pressures in different directions in terms of cultural traditions, as opposed to kind of genetic reproduction. So that's one side of the evolutionary theory is this transmission and dual inheritance.
Speaker: The other is this area called human behavioral ecology. So human behavioral ecology is the analysis of the costs and benefits of different courses of action in given situations.
Speaker: and most famously in this optimal foraging theory. So the case with optimal foraging theory is that people make an assumption in a particular case, let's see what people would do in this particular case if their object was to get the maximum number of calories in the minimum amount of time.
Speaker: And if we can, and for example, it's been suggested that a good measure of people wanting to get lots of calories is reflected in, let's say, the size of the animals they hunt. If you kill a big animal, you've immediately got access to a lot of calories. So potentially, we can actually, we don't need to, we start by saying this is the basis for our hypothesis. But that doesn't mean that's how things will actually turn out.
Speaker: to be the case when you do your archaeological investigation. Because it might turn out when you do your study that there's no way that the results you have would fit in with people trying to maximise their number of calories.
Speaker: So optimal foraging theory isn't, as some people think, a kind of self -fulfilling prophecy. It's just a basis for putting up kind of models and seeing if they fit the evidence that we have.
Speaker: The particularly blatant case of this that I've come across is in the case of hazelnut caches from the Mesolithic and Neolithic mainly, but optimal foraging theory is often introduced in terms of discussing that specific context.
Speaker: because hazelnuts do have quite a high comparative calorific value. So it could indeed be the case that these were collected and stored by prehistoric communities because they were aware that they were particularly filling or beneficial or staple within diet. Although they certainly wouldn't have phrased it themselves as being an item of high calorific value.
Speaker: But equally it could be the case that they cashed hazelnuts because of seasonality and them being one of the few resources which can be cashed successfully. The communities in question could even have just had a particular preference for hazelnuts.
Speaker: So it's important to remember that optimal foraging theory, whenever I have seen it suggested, is just that, a suggestion, a scenario. Otherwise you end up with the quite common criticism whenever it's used of the fact that it linearises human agency.
Speaker: And by that what I mean is that it reduces the spectrum for human choice, but then again it is very difficult to model in a visually appealing manner the full spectrum of human choice in any given situation.
Speaker: Yeah, and say that in the case of animals, for example, one of the things that's been suggested is that people went into for killing large animals because they got a lot of it was a lot of prestige associated that so that actually prestige was more important than calories. So, you know, there's the answers aren't kind of automatically implied by the question or by the starting assumption.
Speaker: Okay guys, it's time for our first ad break and I think this is a good place to just pause it briefly. But fear not, you shall not be gone for long and when you get back we will be discussing how and why and does evolutionary theory help or benefit archaeological modelling of communities. So I shall see you in a second.
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Speaker: Your next question was about the extent to which the theory helps or benefits archaeological modelling of communities. And I think it does because it relates to what we were just talking about. From the theory, we can generate expectations of what we might find in particular situations. And from that, we can develop predictions like the optimal foraging prediction.
Speaker: And so, for example, if we see that people are changing the animals they hunt over time, perhaps there's less big animals, then we might say, well, maybe that is because people were over exploiting a favoured species. That will be one possibility. But equally, another possibility might be that climate change, for example, has changed the distribution of the species concerned.
Speaker: So again, the kind of evolutionary theory generates interesting questions that we could compare with alternative hypotheses. Or again, something which I've done work on is looking at changes in the frequency of particular decorative motifs on pottery in particular communities through time. So again, we can come up with a null model, if you so -called null model.
Speaker: which effectively is that there was nothing really much going on. And we can test that non -model against models, for example, that people became more attracted by novelty, let's say. They tended to prefer new motifs to old motifs, and those new motifs were very strongly preferentially selected. Or alternatively, it might turn out that we see
Speaker: very few new motifs appearing, but the continuation of highly frequent motifs, which might be telling us about changing patterns of conformism in the potters and in the motifs that they preferred. But the basic idea though is that you can
Speaker: that the theory provides you with some kind of framework to ask a question and then to generate what sort of expectations you might expect depending on the process at work. It definitely aids in the clarity of interpretation of data as well, specifically
Speaker: It can help to identify deviations from predicted trends. In recent archaeological modelling work that I've done, it's helped me to identify a recurrence of a secondary crop in an agricultural environment which was secure enough, I thought, not to require the growth of a secondary crop.
Speaker: By that I mean a crop which is not primarily a subsistence crop but is reliable enough to ensure a food source in the event of a drought, for example, where the primary food crop is non -productive. This deviated from what my model predicted would be a trend in a time of food security.
Speaker: No, I think that's a very good point. And I think, effectively, a lot of these models are quantitative. They have to be explicit, and quite often they're quantitative. And if you have to spell things out explicitly, then it automatically makes things clearer, both to yourself when you're trying to build a model, but also to enable, I think,
Speaker: it's clearer for other people. I mean, in a sense, it makes disagreements also easier because you can identify clearly the points where you say, well, I'm not willing to accept that assumption. So I think clarity, as you suggest, clarity always helps.
Speaker: Often archaeological theory is considered to be quite complex, certainly within the remit of archaeological study, but it really is integral when you're trying to analyse and form an argument, which is something every archaeologist is going to have to do at some point.
Speaker: if they're going to use best practice, that is. Unfortunately, archaeological theory is also something which is not often explained to the general public, which means that when we present data and we present our arguments, which is something we should all engage with now as responsible archaeologists in an open science setting.
Speaker: Well, not providing an explanation of theory when we do this puts the public at a disadvantage, because they can't always see the logical processes we've gone through by using archaeological theory to get to our conclusions.
Speaker: which comes to the basic principle which underlies I think open science which is that we shouldn't ask anyone to accept anything we say or provide on blind faith alone. So that leads us into our next barrage of questions which is what would your advice be
Speaker: In regard to where to actually start when studying evolutionary theory in archaeology, what pitfalls might you encounter if you're beginning your study and what mindset should individuals go into study of archaeological theory in general and analysing pre -existing studies which use evolutionary theory within archaeological contexts?
Speaker: Well, I mean, I do think this is kind of me blowing my own trumpet a bit, but a useful starting point. I did a piece in the Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory. I did a chapter on evolutionary archaeologies.
Speaker: And I think that's a kind of useful starting point. I mean, the literature these days is quite massive, but that I think does, and there's some suggestions for further reading there as well. So although that came out in 2014 and was written a bit before that, I still think it provides a useful
Speaker: a useful entry point, let's say. Pitfalls, I think, one of the things which I think with archaeology, I mean, I was saying earlier how important archaeology is because it provides us with a long -term perspective. But equally, in most cases, archaeological evidence lacks chronological resolution.
Speaker: So this means that if you're lucky, you might be able to identify an assemblage, let's say, that accumulated over 50 years, let's say, if you were lucky. So you're not getting individual decisions or you're very rarely likely to be getting individual decisions.
Speaker: may be in kind of ideal circumstances, like the Boxgrove Paleolithic site, where you can actually see the skeleton of the rhino, I think it is, rhino, I can't remember, rhino or a horse, and you can actually see the flakes and tools around it. But most of that's pretty unusual, that kind of Pompeii
Speaker: sort of situation. So chronological resolution is an issue. So we're always going to be sort of averaging across time to a degree. And that's averaging might potentially give us furious results. Let's say for 25 years, people were doing one thing.
Speaker: And then in the next 25 years, they were doing something completely different. If we've only got a record of 50 years resolution, then we're going to get the average of those two. And that simply doesn't correspond to what was actually happening. So that is an issue, I think, for this kind of evolutionary archaeology. In terms of the mindset,
Speaker: I suppose it's broadly scientific and broadly quantitative. I think it's being open -minded, really. It's critical to be open -minded. It's important to be scientifically minded.
Speaker: And it's helpful, I think, to think in quantitative terms. And in particular, some people talk about evolutionary approaches being associated with and useful because they encourage population thinking.
Speaker: So population thinking is the opposite of typological thinking. So archaeologists tend to think in terms of types, you know, saying this is the stereotypical bell beaker, let's say, for example.
Speaker: Whereas what we should be really thinking about is the variation. No bell beaker is the same. They're all slightly different from one another. Some are quite a long way from one another, others are more similar. But what we should be looking at is the pattern variation, not thinking that there is some essence of a bell beaker there that the people who made them were trying to achieve.
Speaker: So again, if we're thinking in terms of trying to document variation, again, that points us to quantitative kinds of statements, in my view, if you like.
Speaker: I definitely agree with your pitfall of chronology there, and there's been some interesting work recently trying to reduce the impact of that, but of course it will, well, always be an issue in my opinion for archaeological studies. I'm thinking of work by Umbashi for example, Umbashi 2020, I think the paper is if you want to try and find it, but she uses
Speaker: the environmental record combined with historical records to compare trends and that has benefited the resolution of her study. Of course that isn't a large -scale solution however because that relies on us having historical records and of course for earlier periods we don't have written historical records and even for the later periods there's no guarantee.
Speaker: But it does demonstrate that there are ways to minimise the impact of archaeological chronology and the practice of averaging in specific circumstances. It's quite exciting as well and is a brilliant study if you want to go and read it. So, I mean, I think people are getting better, for example, with regards to environmental
Speaker: change. Sometimes there's ideal circumstances where you get, you know, lake sediments that are laid down annually, these sort of evolved sediments where you've got annual resolution, which is obviously great. And I think people are getting better in pollen analysis in terms of estimating rates of buildup of sediments by doing lots and lots of radiocarbon dating on a pollen column, for example.
Speaker: But in a project I recently did with some pollen analysis people, the best chronological resolution we could get was 200 years. So we kind of divided our sequence up into kind of 200 year slots. But clearly, that's a lot better than nothing, I think. And it does enable you to trace, let's say, longer term patterns of environmental clearance, for example.
Speaker: It is always useful and beneficial to discuss ethics within each aspect of archaeology that we look at. And there have been particular issues over the years in terms of the ethics of discussing evolution theory in relation to archaeology.
Speaker: Particularly in a few cases where the assertion has been that a community developed in a way which is distinctly different to what modern members of that same community believe to be the case. Specifically, modelling of evolutionary tracts is difficult in this regard.
Speaker: Sometimes it is necessary in research to posit a theory which goes against the accepted grain of a modern cultural group. In this case, the only course of action is to be as respectful as possible and to clarify that any modelling is not an absolute.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean clearly there are ethical issues and I think that one of the reasons why evolutionary approaches have been kind of less accepted on this side of the Atlantic rather than the other side is the assumption that evolutionary ideas are somehow based on social Darwinism.
Speaker: or Western ideas of progress or the selfish gene idea. And I suppose I just think those are clearly those have been problems in the past and which have had and they have had significant kind of very negative consequences in terms of racist ideas and so on.
Speaker: But I think if you actually look at the publications on evolutionary archaeology over the last 20, 25 years, I don't think they show those features. And similarly, I think the idea, for example, that different cultural features are passed on by social learning, and that depends on who you interact with.
Speaker: Things can be passed on from your contemporaries as well as from your parents. I don't think that has any kind of racist assumptions behind it. Similarly, the idea that some people have that thinking about the costs and benefits of a given course of action, some people think that's simply reflecting capitalism into the past.
Speaker: And I mean, as I said earlier, we were talking about optimal foraging. I don't think that's the case. So these optimality assumptions, they provide a basis for hypotheses that we can test with our archaeological data.
Speaker: as I've suggested. And in many cases, they turn out not to fit. And in that case, we've learned something new. But it's worth adding that these cost -benefit ideas are used kind of throughout the evolutionary study of behavior. So it's not your hips. People use these ideas to study the behavior of animals from ants to elephants, really. So this is a kind of what people
Speaker: This optimality idea is something which people have found useful to help understanding animal behavior. And again, it provides a set of hypotheses that we can then investigate to see if those hypotheses fit or not. So I would say my view would be that evolutionary archaeology as it's practiced today
Speaker: doesn't embody those ideas which have given evolution and Darwinism a very negative perception in the past. Clearly, if we're using the ideas, we need to be very careful that we don't end up with those dubious assumptions. But I think if you look at the publications that people produce,
Speaker: I just don't see those aspects. I would completely agree that modern studies really don't suffer from this issue as often, and I think that's because archaeologists are putting checks and balances in place for themselves. It used to be the case, certainly, that capitalist ideas, for example, had a bit of a place in discussions of trading in prehistoric communities that they really shouldn't have occupied.
Speaker: particularly actually when so -called civilised communities became involved, talking about, for example, when the Roman Empire had a place alongside Iron Age communities. Early literature in particular seems to herald this as the beginning of capitalism for Iron Age communities. Thankfully that is no longer the case. Yes. I mean,
Speaker: I think we have to, we can come up with our own, you know, well, you'll be coming up with your own models of let's say of Iron Age agriculture and the factors that affected it. Maybe you could get interesting.
Speaker: For I know, I don't know much about the Iron Age, but there may well be different models about if, let's say, the subsistence is, well, if crops are being cultivated, let's say, as cash crops for exchange with Rome, for example, as opposed to people growing their crops for their local subsistence. I can imagine there might be interesting patterns that we could try and identify there.
Speaker: But I don't think any of them would necessarily involve any starting assumptions about people's motivations. You would want to try and establish that in a kind of compare and contrast sort of approach.
Speaker: Of course we can infer trade, we can look at a resource which perhaps isn't native to a site and infer that it got there via trade. But we don't know the circumstances of that trade and that is something you can only theorise by using, for example, aspects of evolutionary theory or modelling techniques based on evolutionary theory.
Speaker: Some inland sites I'm working with, for example, in lowland Scotland, have evidence of seaweed at those sites, so obviously that has to be imported from somewhere. The model I curated for that suggests that the exchange is happening with more coastal sites in exchange for excess arable product cereals.
Speaker: I cannot definitively know this or prove the existence of this network beyond a reasonable doubt, but based on the archaeological record and evolutionary modelling and human niche construction of localised environments, this is the most likely scenario from my perspective.
Speaker: And that is actually more often than not the case that we can work out, we can see what's going on one way, and it's more difficult to see what's going the other way. But clearly, let's say, well, one thing which I know a little bit about,
Speaker: is the exchange of amber in the Bronze Age from the Baltic coast down further south into these European Bronze Age communities with metal going the other way. So presumably there was some desire on the part of those central European communities to acquire amber and in some sense they were
Speaker: how they conceived of it is another matter. But in some sense, they were prepared to give almost certainly metal bronze and so on in exchange because there wasn't any bronze locally. So there must be some kind of mechanism of kind of people being prepared to supply one good in exchange for another. But again, that doesn't necessarily presuppose any kind of capitalist motivations, if you like.
Speaker: I'm really quite overjoyed to be asking you this next question actually and it concerns your own research. So what projects are you currently working on which include aspects of evolutionary theory and whether you have any new exciting datasets that we should be looking out for.
Speaker: Well, I mean, I've just started on a project called Corex. This is where the full title is Corex from correlations to explanations towards a new European prehistory. And this is it's a big multi -institution project funded by European Synergy Grant. So it involves myself and Mark Thomas at UCL.
Speaker: Then the other institutions are the University of Gothenburg with Christian Christensen and Bettina Schulz -Palsen and Carl Jern -Sjöberg. And then there's the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Speaker: which where they're doing environmental DNA. And then there's the University of Plymouth with pollen analysis people with Jesse Woodbridge and Ralph Fife. So this project has just started. It's very exciting. So its main aim is to explore the correlations or the lack of them
Speaker: between changing material culture and subsistence patterns identified in the archaeological record and patterns in ancient DNA, and then to try and model the processes that might have produced those patterns, for example demographic processes or climate change or transmission processes and so on.
Speaker: So, obviously, the significance of ancient DNA information is something which has had a high profile in the last few years. There have been a lot of discussions about it. So, one of the things that we want to do is to disentangle, as it were, the detailed information about the ancient DNA from the detailed information about the archaeology and subsistence and so on.
Speaker: and rather than assuming that, if you know about these cases, rather than assuming that Yamnaya DNA equals corded ware equals an invasion from the steppe, our aim is to go beyond that kind of simplistic argument which has appeared in the literature and to actually disentangle the detailed processes that
Speaker: that how these things actually relate to one another. For example, it seems fairly clear that some of the cultural changes associated were linked to the appearance of Yamnaya genes were actually going on in populations without any evidence yet of Yamnaya genetic indicators at all. So we want to kind of disentangle all these things and that's the idea.
Speaker: So the project only got underway a couple of months ago, and we're really at the beginning of the data collection stage.
Speaker: That project really does sound like it has some brilliant potential in particular, as you say, in disentangling some of the more linear narratives associated with material culture and the influence of artistic styles and stylistic motifs. It could also really highlight some old interpretive problems or new interpretive problems in the sense that we are just now potentially recognising them.
Speaker: I'd be interested to find out how this sort of approach might affect interpretations on coin iconography, for example. Yeah. So we'll see. So we'll say this project has only just started. But one of the things which is becoming clear is that as more and more of the ancient DNA information is coming out, it's possible to look at patterns in a much more micro kind of level. And we're moving beyond those kind of broad brush patterns now.
Speaker: and we're able to see patterns in much more local detail and I think that's the way forward and that's increasingly exciting. The interdisciplinary nature of the study as well is really exciting and it would be brilliant to see more studies that do that with both some quite old techniques in terms of paleonology working with pollen and some quite new techniques as well actually with ancient DNA which is really exciting at the minute.
Speaker: Yes, no, absolutely. I mean, it's a kind of it's in many ways my is my dream project, really, to work with all these people. I mean, I did the people I've mentioned all the other kind of PIs and leaders, but the people kind of there's some really, you know, dynamic young postdocs and so on really involved in doing the work. And it's
Speaker: It's a real pleasure to work with them and to learn from them. We've all got a chance to think about that brilliant project we've just heard about. We're going to take another ad break here. When we get back, we'll talk in a bit more detail about what evolutionary archaeology actually looks like in theory, in the field, and in datasets, and whether it is actually just a study of patterns and trends.
Speaker: From what we've already heard and discussed, I think we can all agree that it's a little bit more than just patterns and trends. But we'll see you back in just a second. You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t -shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet .com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet .com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
Speaker: Yeah, well, the patterns and trends, I think, are the starting point, really. And one example, kind of a cultural transmission case study, evolutionary case study, would be the work of the French archaeologist, Sebastien Manon, who has been using evolutionary quantitative methods to trace the family tree of changing pottery -making practices in Bronze Age France.
Speaker: And then, as I mentioned, I've done work with colleagues trying to model the processes, accounting for change in the frequency of different decorative motifs in Neolithic communities in Germany.
Speaker: But those are relatively small -scale projects. But in many cases, looking for patterns and trends involves collecting large amounts of information, so -called big data. For example, large numbers of radiocarbon dates to identify population trends, or let's say gathering together large quantities of pollen analysis data to trace the history of land clearance across broad regions.
Speaker: And that's something which is now, all those things now becoming increasingly possible as people create databases to do these things. So some disciplines have had years, scientific disciplines, are simply used to providing, putting their data in the public domain for everybody to use.
Speaker: And archaeology is only just now beginning to move into that position. In the past, people's excavation results were their kind of private property, more or less, and quite often they didn't publish them for donkey's ears. And now there's an increasingly moral obligation, really, and also an obligation from funders for people to make their data publicly available. And that kind of thing is critical for looking at large -scale patterns and building data sets.
Speaker: to get large -scale patterns. But even if we have broad -scale data and patterns, I think we still want to explain them in terms of microscale mechanisms. So if we're going to explain, if we're going to model these changes, I think we have to understand the changes that people made in the past. And that's the importance of using techniques like agent -based modeling.
Speaker: where you can model people's individual choices and how those choices aggregate over time to produce large -scale patterns. So agent -based modeling is another aspect, as well as collecting big data and so on, that fits in with this sort of evolutionary approach.
Speaker: Yes, the developing trend for open science and open data and fair principles is utterly brilliant in terms of encouraging larger, more detailed studies and comparative studies between sites.
Speaker: It's become increasingly obvious in recent years that the more we share data, the more trends that we find, the more interesting circumstances we uncover. It also means we're not losing sight and data as much anymore to the vast archives of grey literature.
Speaker: Apart from that, there's the fact that this as well encourages engagement with the public and when they can access this data themselves, archaeology is understood and appreciated more. I'd put a considerable amount of money on there being some more really exciting projects coming out in the next few years just because of this new trend in data sharing and transparency and accessibility.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so. In one sense, I think you need to have the broad patterns to be able to then pick out the bits, the local patterns that don't fit the broad patterns. And so the more people can make their data available. And it's great. Once again, one of the things I like about the younger generation of researchers
Speaker: Is there really passionate about this, about delivering on the first principles that you mentioned? So I think that bodes really well for the future of the discipline. It is brilliant to hear some optimism and some good news about the supposed future of archaeology at the minute.
Speaker: The Open Science trend has a number of other really brilliant benefits as well, one of them being that with the increased accessibility of large datasets, we will hopefully more easily be able to identify aspects of human agency in decision making. When faced with a small reduced dataset, you are often also reduced to a limited interpretation of human actions. A larger dataset should feature
Speaker: more variation and therefore more inference potential in terms of the motivations and the humanity behind decision making? Well, I think so, because if you've got a broader data set, you can perhaps start differentiating, let's say, the different choices that people made, let's say, in how to exploit an environment.
Speaker: and how those choices changed over time. And then that raises the question, what made people tend to push their choices in this direction rather than that direction? Can we identify the kinds of things that they had in mind, if you like, when they were decorating their pottery or when they were deciding which crops to grow?
Speaker: The concept of choice in human agency actually links really nicely into a consideration which is quite new in archaeology, which is how can we link our studies to the benefit of modern situations. Archaeology is increasingly being asked what relevance it has to modern communities.
Speaker: which is in itself a sort of accountability. This has particularly been the case in recent studies in regard to environments and climate studies. So how does evolutionary discussion link to environment and landscape studies?
Speaker: does human niche theory in any way aid interpretation? And how do these concepts help interpretation of our modern environmental, communal and social issues and situations? Yeah, I think one of the things which we're becoming, I think increasingly, aware of me that you've actually touched
Speaker: on it a few minutes ago. And that is the question of to what extent the consequences of people's actions in a particular case, are they intended or unintended? And one of the things quite clearly, when societies in Western Europe and North America started industrializing, they didn't give any thought to the potential impacts in terms of climate change. And that has only become a kind of apparent stand the line
Speaker: So I think one thing that evolutionary theory can do is I'm not saying that it's unique to evolutionary theory. It can give us insights into potential unintended consequences that other approaches might might miss. So, for example, it looks as though in some cases one of the interesting things with the spread of farming into Europe.
Speaker: is that it seems to have led to population increases, but then those population increases seem to be followed in many areas by busts of some kind. The population drops very significantly in some regions, whether because the population was no longer being replaced or because people moved on to other areas.
Speaker: And so that raises the question, you know, what's going on? What's going on there? Is it where people suddenly faced with kind of external impacts like climate change, which meant that their, let's say, their farming strategy would no longer work because I know rainfall increased and their crops that they were used to.
Speaker: cultivating where, you know, no longer so viable and no longer produced higher yields? Or did people unwittingly exhaust their soils and so they couldn't, again, couldn't maintain the same yields that they used to?
Speaker: So there's very interesting questions there. And I think, related to that, one of the things which is very apparent from these population fluctuations, which we can now see everywhere people look for them in prehistory, is, well,
Speaker: you know, what's happening, what's our own future as the human race? Where for the last 300 or so years we've been on the upslope of a population boom, but can that carry on forever? Are we destined for a population bust to come in the future arising from our courses of action? So I think the kind of
Speaker: evolutionary ideas kind of raise these sorts of questions and the patterns which emerge by, for example, looking at population history from a kind of evolutionary perspective raise a lot of questions about the maintainability of our current lifestyle and so on. In some ways it's hard not to take a pessimistic view
Speaker: It really does seem that evolutionary theory really does have a place in terms of discussions regarding demographics, whether they be modern or archaeological. But I think it has a place as well when we look at cultural studies and perhaps social issues and studies as well.
Speaker: In particular, I think it can help communities to define their own culture without also implying that a culture itself is stagnant, i .e. non -developing across time.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting things now is that I think one of the probably the field in which has been most work on evolutionary studies of material culture is work on pottery. And some of the French school, like the work of people like Valentin Roux and a lot of the kind of people who followed that school, in my opinion, is very close to the kind of evolutionary approach.
Speaker: But one thing now, which I think there's a lot of interest in communities in all parts of the world, in trying to recover their traditional crafts and trying to, as it were, reinstitute their cultural traditions of various kinds. And I think there's
Speaker: In a sense, the kind of work that the evolutionary study of cultural traditions can do is to perhaps bring to light the possibilities that that offers in terms of tracing those cultural traditions and identifying the key factors within them and perhaps helping people to then reconstruct those traditions, those technologies and so on.
Speaker: We are living in a time now where people are constantly trying to define their identity. It should definitely be noted, however, that identity doesn't exist in a steady state. When thinking and speaking archaeologically, which is what I feel qualified to talk about,
Speaker: Identity is a fluid concept, and I actually think that theory, like evolutionary theory, helps to reintroduce a concept of diversity into identity. When thinking and speaking archaeologically,
Speaker: It is difficult to define a community or an individual's identity because across time it evolves and because it evolves it is diverse and multitudinal.
Speaker: I couldn't agree more with that. I mean, there's been a tendency to kind of essentialize identities. And if you take the evolutionary approach, this kind of population thinking that I mentioned earlier, then effectively everybody is different and they have different dimensions of difference.
Speaker: We don't need to think of, this is actually one of the things that Sean Jones pointed out actually in her book years ago on ethnic identities and so on, the importance of escaping from essentialization.
Speaker: thinking in terms of variation, recognizing that identities at any given time are varied and that if we can trace identities into the past archaeological record, we find that they don't stay the same and that they do change and that they continue to be varied, that they were varied in the past as well. So yes, I very much agree with that point.
Speaker: It really links back to the typological thinking you mentioned earlier, but it is quite strange that we've almost begun to apply that to concepts of identity, like there are types of identity. I think specifically in regard to this you mentioned pottery, how different cultures interacting over time create differing and developing pottery styles.
Speaker: With material culture, it's pretty obvious that this doesn't stay the same over time. We are talking about vast quantities of time here. The danger with this thinking is seeing culture as linear and flat. Well, yes.
Speaker: And we're only now, I think, beginning to kind of get a grip on all that. And even in the kind of best investigated areas with the most resources, places like Europe and North America. And there's still these vast unknowns in most of the rest of the world in terms of tracing these patterns, these patterns of variation.
Speaker: and I don't mean it tends to be a kind of arguably a lot of myth -making in terms of filling in the empty gaps.
Speaker: Summing up evolutionary theory seems to be incredibly important and have a lot of potential in terms of being a method of enrichment for terms like community and identity. All these terms that we use so often that aren't so easily defined and can cause quite a lot of contention. In a way introducing the theory to them
Speaker: does make them more difficult to define. However, it does ensure the inclusion of concepts of diversity and movement and development within these phrases and terms that we use as archaeologists so often.
Speaker: Yeah, again, I mean, I would agree with all that. One of the things in one discussion about the role of evolutionary theory as it applies to culture, the philosopher, the kind of evolutionary philosopher, Dan Dennett, likened the evolutionary theory to a kind of universal acid that kind of corroded all prior existing sets of theories and beliefs and so on.
Speaker: And Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson suggested, no, it's not a universal acid at all. It's a better mousetrap. So in that sense, as you say, it enriches the possibilities of things that we can do and opens out ranges of possibilities which are potentially productive. And also, again, back to this population thinking idea, they recognize
Speaker: diversity and variation and ask, you know, how does that come to be? Why does it change? So those kinds of things are, again, I'm not saying that evolutionary theory is uniquely pointing people in those directions, but I think it's a very, I find it a very productive way of looking at the archaeological record and asking and answering interesting questions.
Speaker: Although we've already covered some aspects of this, I'd be really interested to know if you could sum up where you see evolutionary theory in archaeology going, what benefits it might have in coming research and studies, and just some future thinking would be a wonderful way to end this episode. So I suppose one thing perhaps I would say is that
Speaker: I think these new projects that we were talking about, this new interest in things like large scale data and so on, and the application of all sorts of new scientific techniques.
Speaker: is just opening things out in a very exciting way. So, you know, in many respects, I wish I was starting out now rather than coming to the end of my career. So, in that sense, I kind of agree with, I do agree with Christian, Chris Jamson's ideas that these
Speaker: that this kind of scientific revolution is opening up new possibilities that will take us in directions where we don't really know where they'll go and that kind of slightly unknown voyage is exciting. The other thing I would say is that I would say to students, have a look at the recent publications as it were on their own merits rather than automatically assuming
Speaker: that anything to do with evolution is kind of dubious, ethically dubious or politically incorrect. Have a look at these things, as it were, on their own merits rather than automatically assuming that there must be something wrong with them. So I regret to inform you that we again don't have time for our usual tangent time this month.
Speaker: Evolutionary theory when you first come across it might seem, by its nature, a little outdated. But when you read modern studies that don't necessarily state that they use evolutionary theory in their thinking,
Speaker: Well, then you start to see just how useful, in terms of theory, evolutionary thinking is, and conversely, just how modern it seems. Evolutionary theory in regard to culture and identity tells us that we aren't stagnant points in time. We're not fixed, unyielding constants.
Speaker: The very essence of who we are and the actions we take to make and create develop across time. In a very basic sense then, the fundamental foundation of every identity is that it changes, that it's fluid how we define cultures, people, communities, ourselves, and that there are no boundaries even in definition.
Speaker: Rather brilliantly, evolutionary theory and thinking in regard to environment tells us there's hope. Hope, if we begin to try to understand how our actions within the archaeological record and the historical record
Speaker: have made impacts on our environment, the ones that we expect and perhaps the ones that we didn't expect. Quite apart from the concept of survival of the fittest,
Speaker: Evolutionary theory now is used to support diversity. So with that, thank you ever so much for listening to this month's episode of Flipside. You'll find this podcast every month on APN and on every other major streaming platform that includes Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, all of those and more.
Speaker: Quick note, if you enjoy Flipside, there are a plethora of truly amazing podcasts about archaeology on the APN network. If you listen to us, you should try listening around to some of those guys as well. Our special thanks go to Professor Stephen Shannon, who did a brilliant job discussing this quite complex topic with us this month. And you know what? Thanks to you, our listeners, as well. So without further ado, see you on the flip side, guys.
Speaker: you
Speaker: This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www .archpodnet .com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork .com.
Speaker: Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7 .99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet .com slash members for more info.
