| Abstract: |
A scientific archaeology is necessarily evolutionary. Evolutionary archaeology requires an ability to measure population interaction using artifact frequencies. The results of simulation based in cultural transmission and evolutionary theory, demonstrate that the notion of style used by culture historians can be explained by the concept of neutrality. Neutrality not only explains the success of culture historians in building chronologies using historical types but also provides a means for mapping patterns of interaction in the archaeological record through time and across space. Using this theoretical framework, seriation can be shown to be a central method for studying transmission within past populations. Once modified to consider sampling effects, seriation is capable of measuring the contributions of space and time on the structure of homologous similarity. Stylistic descriptions of decorated ceramics from the St. Francis and Memphis areas of Phillips, Ford and Griffin's 1951 survey of the Mississippi river valley provide a test case for evaluating the use of seriation to study population structure. The PFG data form the basis of chronologies for the southeastern United States and are the origins of “phases,” social units traditionally understood to represent communities. The analyses of Phillips, Ford and Griffin's data and new assemblages generated by recollecting seven locations support a hypothesis that at least a portion of the late prehistoric population of the St. Francis and Memphis areas of the Mississippi river valley was organized into spatially cohesive, and potentially hierarchically organized communities. The findings demonstrate the possibility of understanding interaction history using methods like deterministic frequency seriation and stylistic measurement classes, thus allowing archaeologists to create the kinds of group-level units needed to operationalize evolutionary explanations of phenotypic changes seen in the archaeological record.
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