I will look at the paper! A lack of debate would be OK if the cultural units were not asked to carry much meaning, but my bet is that, in the imagination, a shape of pottery soon morphs into a society with diets and customs, just as a yellow eye ring morphs into a lineage with ecology. - ThreadSky

waynemaddison.bsky.social • 52 days ago

I will look at the paper! A lack of debate would be OK if the cultural units were not asked to carry much meaning, but my bet is that, in the imagination, a shape of pottery soon morphs into a society with diets and customs, just as a yellow eye ring morphs into a lineage with ecology.

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waynemaddison.bsky.social•52 days ago

Our paper's main argument is that biologists, in practice, give species a burden (to mean something). We have to admit that burden in our species concept, so that we can hold our empirical methods to account. Our inferences of units must be able to justify the meaning we intend for those units.

waynemaddison.bsky.social•52 days ago

One thing I wonder: How much distinction is made between the curved red line on a pot as distinguishing a culture, versus as the invention of a singular artist? Surely individuals mattered. Paying attention to diversity within a culture would be analogous to paying attention to ILS in biology.

waynemaddison.bsky.social•52 days ago

The Museo Amparo in Puebla, México, has a room that intermixes recent sculptures amongst pre-European-contact sculptures. This treats the old sculptures not just as products of cultures, but also as products of individual artists.

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•52 days ago

We can - sometimes - identify individuals and also assess idiosyncratic vs normative variation (which varies a lot by place, time & craft) but mostly artefacts are used collectively to define 'ethnic' groups. Their precise meaning and purpose - their epistemic burden - are often poorly defined.

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•52 days ago

The issue is now becoming critical again as the amount of palaeogenomic data is increasing but archaeological methods are lagging behind; https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0260-7

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•52 days ago

Some archaeologists have sought to align unit construction very much with how this is done in palaeobiology (fx https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0012), which is not a bad idea IMO but as your paper shows the matter is far from settled!

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•52 days ago

At any rate, explicit approaches that use formal (Darwinian) cultural transmission theory to motivate unit construction remain a minority in the discipline.

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