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The Applications and Challenges of Cultural Phylogenetics in Archaeology: An Introduction

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Cultural Phylogenetics

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Evolution Research ((IDER,volume 4))

Abstract

Inferring and explaining cultural patterns and the ways in which human groups relate and interact over large spans of time or space is one of the biggest challenges for archaeologists. When dealing with either the remote past or the present, researchers struggle to learn about the conditions and mechanisms by which cultural traits originate, move, change, and disappear. The use of phylogenetic methods, originated in evolutionary biology to measure relatedness between species, can help to make significant advances toward those aims. This introduction maps the field of cultural phylogenetics, considers its potential for archaeological research, and summarizes the proposals laid out by the contributors of this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for instance, the works listed in García Rivero, “Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Phylogenetics”, this volume; Lipo et al. 2006; Mace and Jordan 2011; Richerson and Christiansen 2013; Shennan 2009; Whiten et al. 2011.

  2. 2.

    The definitions given in this section have been reworked after Sterelny and Griffiths 2012, 197–200.

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Acknowledgments

This introduction was written with the support of the John Templeton Foundation (grant ID 36288). I thank Ilya Tëmkin, Nathalie Gontier, and the contributors for commenting on a previous draft. I am very grateful to the series editors, Nathalie Gontier and Olga Pombo, for having trusted me with the task of editing this book and in particular to Dr. Gontier for her help throughout this project.

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  1. Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Larissa Mendoza Straffon

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  1. Larissa Mendoza Straffon
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Correspondence to Larissa Mendoza Straffon .

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  1. Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Larissa Mendoza Straffon

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Straffon, L.M. (2016). The Applications and Challenges of Cultural Phylogenetics in Archaeology: An Introduction. In: Mendoza Straffon, L. (eds) Cultural Phylogenetics. Interdisciplinary Evolution Research, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25928-4_1

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