Modelling prehistoric cultural transmission

The archaeological record provides the only source of information on cultural transmission in prehistory. It is therefore an important source of information on the kinds of transmission bias and selection processes prevalent in the past; for example, it can potentially tell us about the likely importance of conformist transmission, which plays an important role in many accounts of cultural evolution, as well as providing information on the degree of transmission fidelity. A major problem of course is that the only information we have is from the artefacts themselves and their spatial and temporal position. On the other hand, archaeological data are intrinsically quantitative and provide information on intra-population variation rarely available from other naturalistic (as opposed to experimental) studies, which mainly offer normative descriptions. The talk will outline some recent modelling studies designed to take advantage of the latter to overcome the former and thus throw light on cultural transmission in Europe’s first farming communities.