Technology as Human Social Tradition: Trait-Based Datasets of Hunter-Gatherer Material Culture (NW Siberia, Northwest Coast, Northern California).
Peter Jordan, 2014. (updated 2021) https://doi.org/10.5284/1026780. How to cite using this DOI
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Resource identifiers
- ADS Collection: 1734
- DOI:https://doi.org/10.5284/1026780
- How to cite using this DOI
Introduction
Archaeologists and Anthropologists have long-standing interests in understanding what drives diversity and change in material culture traditions. This extensive dataset (consisting of 15 separate data files) supports “Technology as Human Social Tradition” (Peter Jordan, University of California Press, 2015).
The goal is to investigate how diverse hunter-gatherer technologies are shaped by distinctive operational sequences, with specific choices made at each stage of production. The book presents an integrated set of ethnographic case-studies from Siberia and Western North America. Each case-study aims to understand how particular material culture traditions are passed from one generation to the next through social learning, the factors that encourage coherent lineages of tradition to form, and the extent to which these lineages track each other and language history over time. The book deploys a new “descent-with-modification” perspective to hunter-gatherer technologies by combining cultural transmission theory with trait-based surveys of material culture and the quantitative modelling of technological traditions, contextualising the results with detailed ethnographic information on lifeways, kinship systems and linguistic diversity. Overall, this framework offers new ways of exploring the primary factors that encourage human cultural diversity in the deep past and through to contemporary times, and the datasets presented here can easily be incorporated into a new generation of studies using a range of methods and approaches.
For further information, see the accompanying Internet Archaeology paper:
Jordan, P. 2021 Technology as Human Social Tradition: 15 Trait-Based Datasets of Hunter-Gatherer Material Culture (Northwest Siberia, Pacific Northwest Coast, Northern California). Data Paper, Internet Archaeology 56. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.56.3
