Glossary

Darwinian fitness The relative or absolute number of offspring produced by an individual or a population, either measured by counting direct descendants or by including offspring of relatives, discounted by their degree of relatedness (inclusive fitness).

Galton’s problem A problem that arises in cross-cultural comparisons if cultures that share traits because of shared histories, including diffusion, are mistakenly considered to have independently developed those traits. Named after a famous objection by Francis Galton to a paper delivered by Edward B. Tylor at a meeting of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1888.

Group selection A mechanism for selection in which social groups are the objects of selection, as might be possible if cooperative interactions among its members enhance the fitness of a group.

Kin selection Selective advantage due to helping behaviors directed toward genetically related individuals (term coined by John Maynard Smith).

Phenotype All the characteristics of an individual that arise from the interaction, over a lifetime, of its genotype with its environment.

Phylogenetic tree A representation of an inferred line of descent for a group of related organisms (or societies), identifying a reconstructed common ancestor and the distances among its descendants.

Selection The retention of favorable variants and the rejection of injurious variants, to paraphrase Darwin’s original definition of natural selection.

Symbol system An organized communication system that is governed by rules and is therefore generative, containing signs that are self-referential (e. g., words defined by other words) and is therefore symbolic.

All archaeologists are concerned with documenting change through time in human cultures and societies. In addition, evolutionary archaeologists seek to explain these changes using evolutionary logic. Like all living things, humans are subject to biological evolution; like many animals, we can transmit behaviors via social learning and imitation. Our evolution has been more complicated still, however, because we also employ a symbol system - which is itself subject to and instrumental in evolution. Variability in how archaeologists currently apply evolutionary theory to explain sociocultural change suggests that our grand synthesis has yet to be developed. But ironically, for a field which denies that change needs to be progressive, much progress has been made over the last two decades in particular and the rate of progress seems to be accelerating.