Cultural phylogenetics and the taxonomy of Late Pleistocene ‘cultures’ in Europe and North America

Cultural phylogenetics and the taxonomy of Late Pleistocene ‘cultures’ in Europe and North America
David N. Matzig & Felix Riede
Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University (Denmark)

@ERC_CLIOARCH

The robust identification of material culture variability remains an important goal in Palaeolithic archaeology, given that such variability is then coupled to interpretations of cultural transmission, demography and adaptation. While most such archaeological cultures are defined on the basis of typological inference – most commonly concerning projectile points – recent application of cultural evolutionary reasoning combined with computer-aided methods such as geometric morphometrics and phylogenetics have raised doubts as to the validity of many entrenched groupings, especially in regard to the Late Pleistocene in Europe and North America. In this paper, we present a comparative exploration of cultural taxonomic structure in Late Pleistocene/early Holocene projectile points from the Final Palaeolithic of Europe and the Paleoindian techno-complexes respectively. We first apply geometric morphometric techniques comparing prior landmark-based analyses with alternative outline-focused approaches. Then, we seek structure in the data using a range of clustering approaches, and discuss whether the resulting clusters may be seen as reflections of past communities or constellations of practice. Ultimately, our attempts at deriving a more robust, phylogenetically-based cultural taxonomy for this period is to not only understand contemporaneous cultural diversity in a methodologically transparent manner but to feed these cultural phylogenies forward into explorations of adaptation using the toolbox of the comparative method.