Defining And Measuring Diversity In Archaeology

Calculating the diversity of biological or cultural classes is a fundamental way of describing, analyzing, and understanding the world around us. Understanding archaeological diversity is key to understanding human culture in the past. Archaeologists have long experienced a tenuous relationship with statistics; however, the regular integration of diversity measures and concepts into archaeological practice is becoming increasingly important. This volume includes chapters that cover a wide range of archaeological applications of diversity measures. Featuring studies of archaeological diversity ranging from the data-driven to the theoretical, from the Paleolithic to the Historic periods, authors illustrate the range of data sets to which diversity measures can be applied, as well as offer new methods to examine archaeological diversity.

Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology aims to examine what we mean by diversity.

This volume emphasizes one aspect of scientific method: units of measure and their construction as applied to archaeology. Attributes, artifact classes, locational designations, temporal periods, sampling universes, culture stages, and geographic regions are all examples of constructed units.

30 papers explore a wide range of topics such as women’s voices in archaeological discourse; researching race and ethnicity across time; use of diversified science methods in archaeology; critical ethnographic studies; diversity in the archaeology of death, heritage studies, and archaeology of ‘scapes’.

Combining historical research with a lucid explication of archaeological methodology and reasoning, Measuring Time with Artifacts examines the origins and changing use of fundamental chronometric techniques and procedures and analyzes the different ways American archaeologists have studied changes in artifacts, sites, and peoples over time. In highlighting the underpinning ontology and epistemology of artifact-based chronometers?cultural transmission and how to measure it archaeologically?this volume covers issues such as why archaeologists used the cultural evolutionism of L. H. Morgan, E. B. Tylor, L. A. White, and others instead of biological evolutionism; why artifact classification played a critical role in the adoption of stratigraphic excavation; how the direct historical approach accomplished three analytical tasks at once; why cultural traits were important analytical units; why paleontological and archaeological methods sometimes mirror one another; how artifact classification influences chronometric method; and how graphs illustrate change in artifacts over time. An understanding of the history of artifact-based chronometers enables us to understand how we know what we think we know about the past, ensures against modern misapplication of the methods, and sheds light on the reasoning behind archaeologists' actions during the first half of the twentieth century.

This collection of essays brings together several different evolutionary perspectives to demonstrate how lithic technological systems are a byproduct of human behavior. The essays cover a range of topics, including human behavioral ecology, cultural transmission, phylogenetic analysis, macroevolution, and various applications of evolutionary ecology.

As the study of Palaeolithic technologies moves towards a more analytical approach, it is necessary to determine a consistent procedural framework. The contributions to this timely and comprehensive volume do just that. This volume incorporates a broad chronological and geographical range of Palaeolithic material from the Lower to Upper Palaeolithic. The focus of this volume is to provide an analysis of Palaeolithic technologies from a quantitative, empirical perspective. As new techniques, particularly quantitative methods, for analyzing Palaeolithic technologies gain popularity, this work provides case studies showcasing these new techniques. Employing diverse case studies, and utilizing multivariate approaches, morphometrics, model-based approaches, phylogenetics, cultural transmission studies, and experimentation, this volume provides insights from international contributors at the forefront of recent methodological advances.

More than 7000 years ago, groups of early farmers (the Linearbandkeramik, or LBK) spread over vast areas of Europe. Their cultural characteristics comprised common choices and styles of execution, with a central meaning and functionality attached to ‘doing things a certain way’, over an enormous geographical area. However, recent evidence suggests that the reality was much more varied and diverse. The central question of this book is the extent to which notions of ‘uniformity’ and ‘diversity’ have caused a wider shift in archaeological perspective. Using the LBK case study as a starting point, the volume brings together contributions by international specialists tackling the notion of cultural diversity and its explanatory power in archaeological analysis more generally. Through discussions of the domestic architecture, stone tool inventory, pottery traditions, landscape use and burial traditions of the LBK, this book provides a crucial reappraisal of the culture’s potential for adaptability and change. Papers in the second part of the volume are devoted to archaeological case studies from around the globe in which the tension between diversity and uniformity has also proved controversial, including the Near Eastern Halaf culture, the North American Mississippian, the Pacific expansion of the Lapita culture, and the European Bell Beaker phenomenon. All provide exciting theoretical and methodological contributions on how the appreciation of cultural diversity as a whole can be moved forward. These papers expose diversity and uniformity as cultural strategies, and as such provide essential reading for scholars in archaeology and anthropology, and for anyone interested in the interplay between material culture and human social change.