Archaeology, Cultural Transmission, and the Indigenous Native American Indians of the Great Basin Region of North America

There are two contradicting, but broadly held, views and understandings when it comes to the deep history of indigenous Native American Indian peoples in the Great Basin culture region of North America. The predominate one found in archaeology and across much of the social sciences is that today’s indigenous Native American Indians of the Great Basin (the Paiute, Shoshone, Washoe, Ute, Bannock, Kawaiisu, and Chemehuevi) have only resided in the area for a relatively short time; on the order of perhaps 1000 years. The other understanding of Great Basin human history held by the Native Americans and those scientists who look at a slightly different dataset, includes indigenous Native Americans as deeptime participants of the region.

Often argued under the rubric of Lamb’s 1958 Numic hypothesis, these two conflicting views on history have slowly been coming together. As initially argued by Dr. Jones in Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West, and then Lithic Projectile Points and the Great Basin Region of North America, new archaeological analyses is lending continued support to an emerging understanding. This emerging understanding centers around the idea of cultural transmission: the mechanism by which technological skills, knowledge, and practices are passed from individual to individual and from group to group.

In an attempt to explain the spatial and temporal patterns observed in the archaeological record, such as why a particular artifact is found in one region but not in another region, or why an artifact type differs in shape or size between two sites, the idea of cultural transmission has slowly gained ground. As cultural transmission has been embraced in the Great Basin, the Numic hypothesis has lost what shaky evidence it had to start. In a recent paper entitled The Cultural Transmission of Great Basin Projectile-Point Technology II: An Agent-Based Computer Simulation authors Alex Mesoudi and Michael J. O’Brien lend support to the emerging understanding of Native American deeptime history in the region.

Abstract

We present an agent-based computer simulation that extends a previous experimental simulation (Mesoudi and O’Brien 2008) of the cultural transmission of projectile-point technology in the prehistoric Great Basin, with participants replaced with computer-generated agents. As in the experiment, individual learning is found to generate low correlations between artifact attributes, whereas indirectly biased cultural transmission (copying the point design of the most successful hunter) generates high correlations between artifact attributes. These results support the hypothesis that low attribute correlations in prehistoric California resulted from individual learning, and high attribute correlations in prehistoric Nevada resulted from indirectly biased cultural transmission. However, alternative modes of cultural transmission, including conformist transmission and random copying, generated similarly high attribute correlations as indirect bias, suggesting that it may be difficult to infer which transmission rule generated this archaeological pattern. On the other hand, indirect bias out-performed all other cultural-transmission rules, lending plausibility to the original hypothesis. Importantly, this advantage depends on the assumption of a multimodal adaptive landscape in which there are multiple locally optimal artifact designs. Indeed, in unimodal fitness environments no cultural transmission rule outperformed individual learning, highlighting how the shape of the adaptive landscape within which cultural evolution occurs can strongly influence the dynamics of cultural transmission. Generally, experimental and computer simulations can be useful in answering questions that are difficult to address with archaeological data, such as identifying the consequences of different modes of cultural transmission or exploring the effect of different selective environments.

The authors summarize their findings of the cultural transmission computer model in the following manner. First, the authors confirmed that cultural transmission acts to increase correlations between artifact attributes and reduce within-group variation, relative to individual learning. This supports Bettinger and Eerkens (1999) argument to the same effect with respect to Great Basin projectile point designs, as well as Eerkens and Lipo’s (2005) more general model of trait variation. However, whereas Bettinger and Eerkens assumed that this cultural transmission was indirectly biased (that people were copying the most successful group member’s point design), in this paper the authors demonstrate that alternative modes of cultural transmission (copying the majority, copying the group average, and copying at random) generated similarly high correlations between attributes and similarly reduced within-group variation.

Second, the authors demonstrate that the “copy-the-successful” cultural-transmission strategy, which is analogous to indirectly biased cultural transmission, significantly outperformed the other cultural-transmission strategies and indeed was the only strategy to outperform individual learning.

As such, these two findings lend support to earlier arguments presented in Lithic Projectile Points and the Great Basin Region of North America and Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West. This argument, based on the majority of the physical, linguistic, archaeological, and cultural evidence contends that the present-day indigenous Native American Indian peoples of the Great Basin are culturally affiliated with the peoples of the distant past. As evidence from Mesoudi and O’Brien’s study supports, the link of cultural affiliation can be seen via the archaeological evidence under the model of cultural transmission.

References

Bettinger, Rober L., and Jelmer Eerkens. 1999. Point Typologies, Cultural Transmission, and the Spread of Bow-and-Arrow Technology in the Prehistoric Great Basin. American Antiquity 64:231-242.

Eerkens, Jelmer W., and Carl P. Lipo. 2005. Cultural Transmission Theory and the Archaeological Record: Providing Context to Understanding Variation and Temporal Changes in Material Culture and the Archaeological Record. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 24:316-334.

Jones, Peter N. 2005. Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West.Boulder, CO: Bauu Institute.

Shennan, Stephen J. 2002. Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution.Thames and Hudson, London.