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Seminar: Stimulus Diffusion and the Sharing of Foragers Lithic Technological Knowledge: An Agent-Based Model | The Institute of Archaeology

Seminar: Stimulus Diffusion and the Sharing of Foragers Lithic Technological Knowledge: An Agent-Based Model

Date: 
Tue, 10/01/201716:30
Location: 
prehistoric Room 300

 

Lecturer: Dr. Gilbert Tostevin, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Minnesota

The sharing of information is critical to the adaptation of hominin hunter-gatherer bands (Whallon et al. 2011).  Yet the variation in how information is transmitted, learned, and practiced is incompletely understood in ethnographic, no less archaeological, contexts. The agent-based modeling of cultural transmission processes can assist both anthropologists and archaeologists to explore this subject. Here two modelers and one archeologist collaborate to measure the consequences of the incomplete sharing of the technological knowledge to produce curated lithic tool kits. Using Premo's (2015) work on studying the ramifications of forager mobility strategies for cultural transmission as well as Premo & Tostevin’s (2016) study of how the location of learning (taskscape visibility per Tostevin 2007) complicates these processes, we explore Kroeber's (1940) concept of stimulus diffusion, i.e., the spread of an idea without its developmental details. Building off of an agent-based model established in previous publications, we characterize the stimulus diffusion of knowledge among foraging groups that is unconstrained by the material sequence of development, i.e., when it is not generatively entrenched in Wimsatt's (1986) terms.  To this stimulus diffusion of pure ideas, we compare the stimulus diffusion of a curated lithic tool kit which is generatively entrenched in the products of

its developmental sequence, i.e., when tool morphology is predicated on the range of variation in blank morphologies produced during core reduction. We explore the results of our comparison in light of the debate over the possible acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans as well as the relationships between the Châtelperronian, Protoaurignacian, and other Paleolithic technocomplexes (d’Errico et al. 1998; Tostevin 2007; Roussel et al. 2016).

Readings:

Premo, L.S., Tostevin, G.B., 2016. Cultural Transmission on the Taskscape: Exploring the Effects of Taskscape Visibility on Cultural Diversity. PLoS ONE 11, e0161766.

http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0161766

Roussel, M., Soressi, M., Hublin, J.J., 2016. The Châtelperronian conundrum: Blade and bladelet lithic technologies from Quinçay, France. Journal of Human Evolution 95, 13-32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2016.02.003

Tostevin, G.B., 2007. Social intimacy, artefact visibility, and acculturation model of Neanderthal-Modern Human Interaction. In: Mellars, P., Boyle, K., Stringer, C., Bar-Yosef, O. (Eds.), Rethinking the Human Revolution: Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origin and Dispersal of Modern Humans. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.