Darwinian Archaeologies

Just over 20 years ago the publication of two books indicated the reemergence of Darwinian ideas on the public stage. E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, spelt out and developed the implications of ideas that had been quietly revolutionizing biology for some time. Most controversial of all, needless to say, was the suggestion that such ideas had implications for human behavior in general and social behavior in particular. Nowhere was the outcry greater than in the field of anthropology, for anthropologists saw themselves as the witnesses and defenders of human di­ versity and plasticity in the face of what they regarded as a biological determin­ ism supporting a right-wing racist and sexist political agenda. Indeed, how could a discipline inheriting the social and cultural determinisms of Boas, Whorf, and Durkheim do anything else? Life for those who ventured to chal­ lenge this orthodoxy was not always easy. In the mid-l990s such views are still widely held and these two strands of anthropology have tended to go their own way, happily not talking to one another. Nevertheless, in the intervening years Darwinian ideas have gradually begun to encroach on the cultural landscape in variety of ways, and topics that had not been linked together since the mid-19th century have once again come to be seen as connected. Modern genetics turns out to be of great sig­ nificance in understanding the history of humanity.

Contenu

Introduction: Darwinian Archaeologies: An Introductory Essay; H. Maschner, S. Mithen. Cultural and Behavioral Selection: The Historical Development of an Evolutionary Archaeology: A Selectionist Approach; M.J. O'Brien. Explaining the Change from Biface to Flake Technology: A Selectionist Application; A.L. Abbot, et al. Cultural Virus Theory and the Eusocial Pottery Assemblage; B.R.S. Cullen. Organized Dissonance: Multiple Code Structures in the Replication of Human Culture; R. Fletcher. Paths to Revisionism in CulturalBehavioral Selection: Individuals and Dual Inheritance: Kin Selection and the Origins of Hereditary Social Inequality: A Case Study from the Northern Northwest Coast; H.D.G. Maschner, J.Q. Patton. Archaeology, Style, and the Theory of Coevolution; K.M. Ames. Style, Function, and Cultural Evolutionary Processes; R.L. Bettinger, et al. In Search of the Watchmaker: Attribution of Agency in Natural and Cultural Selection; P. Graves-Brown. Cognition and the Evolution of Mental Adaptations: Weak Modularity and the Evolution of Human Social Behavior; J. Steele. The Origin of Art: Natural Signs, Mental Modularity and Visual Symbolism; S. Mithen. Overview: The State of Evolutionary Archaeology; R.L. Bettinger, P.J. Richerson. Index.