Design Space Constraints and the Cultural Taxonomy of European Final Palaeolithic Large Tanged Points: A Comparison of Typological, Landmark-Based and Whole-Outline Geometric Morphometric Approaches

The identification of material culture variability remains an important goal in archaeology, as such variability is commonly coupled with interpretations of cultural transmission and adaptation. While most archaeological cultures are defined on the basis of typology and research tradition, cultural evolutionary reasoning combined with computer-aided methods such as geometric morphometrics (GMM) can shed new light on the validity of many such entrenched groupings, especially in regard to European Upper Palaeolithic projectile points and their classification. Little methodological consistency, however, makes it difficult to compare the conclusions of such studies. Here, we present an effort towards a benchmarked, case-transferrable toolkit that comparatively explores relevant techniques centred on outline-based GMM. First, we re-analyse two previously conducted landmark-based analyses of stone artefacts using our whole-outline approach, demonstrating that outlines can offer an efficient and reliable alternative. We then show how a careful application of clustering algorithms to GMM outline data is able to successfully discriminate between distinctive tool shapes and suggest that such data can also be used to infer cultural evolutionary histories matching already observed typo-chronological patterns. Building on this baseline work, we apply the same methods to a dataset of large tanged points from the European Final Palaeolithic (ca. 15,000–11,000 cal BP). Exploratively comparing the structure of design space within and between the datasets analysed here, our results indicate that Final Palaeolithic tanged point shapes do not fall into meaningful regional or cultural evolutionary groupings but exhibit an internal outline variance comparable to spatiotemporally much closer confined artefact groups of post-Palaeolithic age. We discuss these contrasting results in relation to the architecture of lithic tool design spaces and technological differences in blank production and tool manufacture.

Book review: The prehistoric apprentice: Investigating apprenticeship, know-how and expertise in prehistoric technologies; L’apprenti préhistorique: Appréhender l’apprentissage, les savoir-faire et l’expertise à travers les productions techniques des soci

Describing cultural change and variability and inferring sociocultural dynamics about past people and communities may be among archaeology’s main goals as a field of practice. In this regard, the concept of skill has proved its usefulness to, time and again, expand the breath of archaeologists and lithic technologists’ analyses. It covers a wide range of applications, from apprenticeship, cognition, paleo-sociology, spatial organization. It is one of the main causes for material culture variability, up there with raw material constraints, design, technological organization or cultural norms. Yet, while skill has certainly been the focus of some research in the last decades, it remains quite peripheral, when considering how central the concept should be to technological inquiries. Whatever the reasons may be, this book, edited by Laurent Klaric and fully bilingual (French and English), aims at changing that, and argues for skill to become a central concern in lithic technology. Its chapters do so strongly and the end-result is a book that should become a reference for lithic technologists, whatever their research interests or schools of thought may be.

Journeys of the mind: cognitive landscapes, symbolic dialects, and networked identities in the European Neolithic

Although the notion that the past was populated by cultural spheres containing relatively homogenous populations is pervasive, nuanced considerations of intra-culture variability allow for the recognition of local or regional identities that were simultaneously connected to but distinct from an overarching cultural sphere. This requires the identification of multiple interrelated cultural constituents and the recognition of a kind of cultural layering in which the identity or identities salient for members of a particular group are conceptualized as consisting of variably articulating categories that interact with and depend upon each other. Our approach to cultural variability and identity construction is based on this view and posits that cultural spheres studied in archaeological contexts can be divided into distinct but related cultural subgroups or dialects based on variations in material cultural data and studied independently or comparatively.

Cultural, National,and Individual Diversity and their Relationship to the Experience of Meaningful Work

This chapter explores cultural, national, and individual diversity, and their relationships with meaningful work. Most studies relevant to meaningful work have originated in Western cultures and developed countries. Few studies have focused on the relationship between cultural and national diversity and meaningful work. The study of relationships between meaningful work, values, and organizational practices on individual, organizational, and national levels is challenging given different methods to aggregate data as well as the different levels involved. Both individual-level and multilevel studies are required to study the complex relationships between diversity and meaningful work. Assessing meaningful work from a national culture perspective could be problematic, as national culture fails to account for factors such as within-culture variability, acculturation, the changing nature of cultural aspects (e.g. values), and cultural tightness or looseness. Longitudinal and experimental designs should be used to study the relationship between cultural, national, and individual diversity and meaningful work.

Simulating cultural transmission: preliminary results and their implications for the study of formal variability of material culture in the Central Balkan Neolithic

In this paper, we adopt the theoretical framework of evolutionary archaeology in order to model and simulate cultural transmission between hypothetical Neolithic sites in Balkans. We simulate neutral cultural transmission in order to compare the simulation results with empirically observed patterns of material culture variability such as traditional archaeological cultures. Our preliminary results show that a series of random local interactions can result in spatial groupings of typologically similar assemblages that correspond to the spatial distributions of traditional archaeological cultures, even in the absence of any other ‘external’ factor such as an overarching regional political structure or shared collective identity.

Plasticity of fimbrial genotype and serotype within populations of Bordetella pertussis: analysis by paired flow cytometry and genome sequencing

The fimbriae of Bordetella pertussis are required for colonization of the human respiratory tract. Two serologically distinct fimbrial subunits, Fim2 and Fim3, considered important vaccine components for many years, are included in the Sanofi Pasteur 5-component acellular pertussis vaccine, and the World Health Organization recommends the inclusion of strains expressing both fimbrial serotypes in whole-cell pertussis vaccines. Each of the fimbrial major subunit genes, fim2, fim3, and fimX, has a promoter poly(C) tract upstream of its −10 box. Such monotonic DNA elements are susceptible to changes in length via slipped-strand mispairing in vitro and in vivo, which potentially causes on/off switching of genes at every cell division. Here, we have described intra-culture variability in poly(C) tract lengths and the resulting fimbrial phenotypes in 22 recent UK B. pertussis isolates. Owing to the highly plastic nature of fimbrial promoters, we used the same cultures for both genome sequencing and flow cytometry. Individual cultures of B. pertussis contained multiple fimbrial serotypes and multiple different fimbrial promoter poly(C) tract lengths, which supports earlier serological evidence that B. pertussis expresses both serotypes during infection.