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Style, Function and Cultural Transmission

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Culture History and Convergent Evolution

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

Recent evolutionary approaches to the understanding of lithic variability take us back to long-standing issues in lithic studies to do with the claimed contrast between style and function and the Binford-Bordes debate of the 1960s concerning the factors that affect inter-assemblage variation. In fact, the style and function contrast is an unhelpful one, not least when considering the question of convergence. Taking the definition of style as ‘a way of doing’, all functions are carried out in locally specific ways that have a transmission history, although the extent to which the history of the attributes relevant to the function have been subject to random drift and innovation patterns, as opposed to selection, will vary. Moreover, in a subtractive technology like lithics the extent to which a transmission signal will be visible in an attribute like the angle of a cutting edge is unclear. The contrasting view is that, in the case of lithics, functional requirements will always call into existence the technical innovations to satisfy them, which in any case are not that difficult to find. The paper addresses these and related issues with reference to previous work by Shennan and colleagues on the use of material culture to identify within and between group variation, the extent to which isolation-by-distance in space and time can account for the similarities and differences between assemblages, and the role of phylogenetic methods.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31–34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK

    Stephen Shennan

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  1. Stephen Shennan
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  1. Extreme Events Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany

    Huw S. Groucutt

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Shennan, S. (2020). Style, Function and Cultural Transmission. In: Groucutt, H. (eds) Culture History and Convergent Evolution. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46126-3_15

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