SATELLITE SESSION SCHEDULE
The book of abstract is now available here
Detecting the Basis of Sociocultural Complexity in Animals and Humans
Efficiency as a driver of cultural evolution: from birds to primates
Materialising complexity. A conceptual model of material culture, social complexity and mechanisms of change
Conceptual framework of assessing the influence of cultural complexity to settlement pattern formation
Constructing socio-political networks from obsidian artefacts in pre-European Aotearoa/New Zealand
The concept of archaeological cultures – an inside from complex networks approach
The evolution of classification systems as indicator of cultural evolution
Simulating institutional innovation and the collapse of complex societies
Inferring processes of cultural transmission: the critical role of rare variants
Understanding how social information is used in human populations is one of the
challenges in cultural evolution. Fine-grained individual-level data, detailing who learns
from whom, would be most suited to answer this question empirically but this kind of
data is difficult to obtain especially in pre-modern contexts. Therefore inference
procedures have often been based on population-level data in form of frequency
distributions of a number of different variants of a cultural trait at a certain point in time
or of time-series that describe the dynamics of the frequency change of cultural variants
over time, often comprising sparse samples from the whole population. In this talk we
demonstrate that there exist theoretical limits to the accuracy of the inference of
underlying processes of cultural transmission from aggregated data highlighting the
problem of equifinality especially in situations of sparse data. Crucially we show the
importance of rare variants for inferential questions. The presence, or absence, of rare
variants as well as the spread behaviour of innovations carry a stronger signature about
underlying processes than the dynamic of high-frequency variants. On the example of
the choice of baby names, we illustrate that the consistency between empirical data,
summarized by the so-called progeny, and hypotheses about cultural evolution such as
neutral evolution or novelty biases depends entirely on the completeness of the data set
considered. Analyses based on only the most popular variants, as is often the case in
studies of cultural evolution, can provide misleading evidence for underlying processes of
cultural transmission.
When culture meets economy: modelling cultural complexity in an economic setting
A computational Cultural Transmission model of Bronze Age burial rites in Central, Northern and Northwestern Europe