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The Acceleration of Cultural Change
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 176

The Acceleration of Cultural Change

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2017-08-25
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our a...

I'll Have What She's Having
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 161

I'll Have What She's Having

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011-08-26
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

How we learn from those around us: an essential guide to understanding how people behave. Humans are, first and foremost, social creatures. And this, according to the authors of I'll Have What She's Having, shapes—and explains—most of our choices. We're not just blindly driven by hard-wired instincts to hunt or gather or reproduce; our decisions are based on more than “nudges” exploiting individual cognitive quirks. I'll Have What She's Having shows us how we use the brains of others to think for us and as storage space for knowledge about the world. The story zooms out from the individual to small groups to the complexities of populations. It describes, among other things, how buzzw...

The Importance of Small Decisions
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 161

The Importance of Small Decisions

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2019-03-12
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

How people make decisions in an era of too much information and fake news. Humans originally evolved in a world of few choices. Prehistoric, preindustrial, and predigital eras required fewer decisions than today's all-access, always-on world of too much information. Economists have largely discarded the idea that agents act rationally and the market follows suit. It seems that no matter how small or innocuous a decision might seem, there's almost no way to guess the effect it might have. The authors of The Importance of Small Decisions view decisions and their outcomes from a different perspective: as key elements in the evolution of culture. In this trailblazing book, they examine different...

Complex Systems and Archaeology
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 168

Complex Systems and Archaeology

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2003
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  • Publisher: Unknown

This volume provides a useful introduction to complex systems and the theory that goes with them. It is followed by a series of case studies in which human societies and environments are seen as open systems into and out of which people and objects, and energy, can flow.

Handbook of Archaeological Theories
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 598

Handbook of Archaeological Theories

This handbook, a companion to the authoritative Handbook of Archaeological Methods, gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists on all aspects of the latest thinking about archaeological theory. It is the definitive resource for understanding how to think about archaeology.

Innovation in Cultural Systems
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 297

Innovation in Cultural Systems

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2010
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

Leading scholars offer a range of perspectives on the roles played by innovation in the evolution of human culture. In recent years an interest in applying the principles of evolution to the study of culture emerged in the social sciences. Archaeologists and anthropologists reconsidered the role of innovation in particular, and have moved toward characterizing innovation in cultural systems not only as a product but also as an evolutionary process. This distinction was familiar to biology but new to the social sciences; cultural evolutionists from the nineteenth to the twentieth century had tended to see innovation as a preprogrammed change that occurred when a cultural group "needed" to ove...

The Edge of Reason?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 247

The Edge of Reason?

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2008-11-22
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  • Publisher: A&C Black

Should scientists challenge religious beliefs in modern society? This book gives voice to those scientist and theologians whose experience holds direct relevance in the confrontational science and religion debate.

Handbook of Archaeological Theories
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 604

Handbook of Archaeological Theories

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An extensive bibliography is included. This volume is the single most important reference for current information on contemporary archaeological theories.

Complex Systems and Archaeology
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 164

Complex Systems and Archaeology

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2003
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  • Publisher: Unknown

Complexity science transects many fields ranging from physics to economics to biology. Its focus is the study of systems of interacting factors, which has lately been extended to include behavior in human societies. In prehistoric societies, whether these agents are defined at the scale of individuals, groups, households, or villages all agents are connected in such a way that change in the actions of one affects many others. Complex Systems and Archaeology presents a useful introduction to complexity theory followed by a series of case studies in which human societies and environments are viewed as open systems into and out of which matter or energy can flow. Examples of such systems include the introduction of new crops, the creation of new artifacts, or the flux of products in a market. This volume will have important implications for how archaeologists understand the dynamics of culture change and how they think about chronological stages, unique events, and the role of human agents.

The First Farmers of Central Europe
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 561

The First Farmers of Central Europe

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2013-07-09
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  • Publisher: Oxbow Books

From about 5500 cal BC to soon after 5000 cal BC, the lifeways of the first farmers of central Europe, the LBK culture (Linearbandkeramik), are seen in distinctive practices of longhouse use, settlement forms, landscape choice, subsistence, material culture and mortuary rites. Within the five or more centuries of LBK existence a dynamic sequence of changes can be seen in, for instance, the expansion and increasing density of settlement, progressive regionalisation in pottery decoration, and at the end some signs of stress or even localised crisis. Although showing many features in common across its very broad distribution, however, the LBK phenomenon was not everywhere the same, and there is...