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Investigating Archaeological Cultures pp 61–75Cite as

Cultural Innovation from an Americanist Perspective

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Abstract

No matter how wide a search one might conduct, it would be difficult to find another topic in anthropology that has played as an important a role as innovation in framing arguments about why and how human behavior changes (O’Brien 2007; O’Brien and Shennan 2010). Clearly, innovation was implicit in the nineteenth century writings of ethnologists, such as Tylor (1871) and Morgan (1877), both of whom viewed the production of novelties – new ideas, new ways of doing things, and the like – as the underlying evolutionary force that keeps cultures moving up the ladder of cultural complexity. From their point of view, the vast majority of cultures that have ever existed pooped out somewhere on the way up – presumably because they either ran out of good ideas and products or were too set in their ways to borrow them from other cultures. A few were innovative enough to escape the lower rungs and develop into civilizations through the acquisition of traits, such as writing, calendars, and monumental architecture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Lyman (2008) for a detailed discussion of the early history of cultural-transmission studies in ethnology and archaeology, Lyman and O’Brien (2003) for a similar history of work on the units of transmission, and O’Brien (2007) for a more detailed look at the evolutionary implications of cultural-transmission studies.

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Acknowledgments

My ideas on cultural transmission have been greatly influenced by my ­collaborations with Lee Lyman, Alex Mesoudi, and Stephen Shennan.

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  1. University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Michael J. O’Brien

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  1. Michael J. O’Brien
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Correspondence to Michael J. O’Brien .

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  1. Dept. Prehistory & Europe, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG, United Kingdom

    Benjamin W. Roberts

  2. , School of Archaeology and Ancient Histor, Leicester University, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, United Kingdom

    Marc Vander Linden

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O’Brien, M.J. (2011). Cultural Innovation from an Americanist Perspective. In: Roberts, B., Vander Linden, M. (eds) Investigating Archaeological Cultures. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6970-5_4

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