The main theme of the 45th Theoretical Archaeology Group is ‘Evolution?’ It prompts us to consider whether evolutionary models are still relevant for understanding culture change through archaeology. While many scholars would agree that culture is characterised by the fundamental tenets of universal Darwinism (i.e. variation, selection, and heredity) and be sympathetic to a definition of culture as ‘information that is passed from individual to individual nongenetically, via social learning processes such as teaching or imitation’, there is an extensive and diverse, and often contrasting bodies of theory that aim to understand cultural change. Some of these, such as social evolution and dual inheritance theory, are comparatively well known to archaeologists, while others, such as cultural attraction theory, have received less scholarly attention. It follows that the term of evolutionary models is perhaps too broad as a category to allow us to determine its relevance in the archaeological discourse. Many models have been misunderstood, some concepts abused, and several opportunities for development and synergies were missed Evolutionary thinking in archaeology also runs the risk of being outdated when compared with modern evolutionary thought – which is constantly changing, as demonstrated by the recent (debated) calls for an extended evolutionary synthesis. This session will gather speakers who believe that the answer to the question ‘Evolution?’ is ‘Evolution.’, but are critically aware of the many limitations of what has been achieved so far, and are open to reconsidering, updating, breaking, and possibly rebuilding many of the pillars of current thoughts and premises of evolutionary archaeology.
11:40am | Reframing Evolutionary Archaeology in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis; a holistic scaled systems approach | Kuipers, K.J.
12:00pm | Cultural Microevolution and Archaeology | Enrico Crema
12:20pm | ‘Concepts’ in dynamic assemblages: an integrative and encompassing evolutionary framework and its archaeological relevance | Jennifer French, Marc Kissel, Somaya Khaksar & Augustin Fuentes
12:40pm | Relating Material Culture and Demographic Trends: A case on prehistoric arrowheads | Alfredo Cortell-Nicolau
2:00pm | The (Per)Mutation Problem: Outlining a new approach to long-term developments in ceramic technology | Erik Kroon
2:20pm | Can we use the present to interpret the past? Ethnographic analogy and cultural evolution. | Marc Vander Linden, Andres Angourakis & Francesco Carrer
3:20pm | MetaPypulation | Marc Vander Linden & Matteo Tomasini
3:20pm | Evolutionary Archaeology: Time for a Rethink | Mike O'Brien
3:40pm | Discussion |
Full paper abstracts available here: https://tag2024.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/tag-2024-session-abstracts-1.pdf
