Research compendium for 'A quantiative analysis of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy and evolution in Europe'
The files at the URL above will generate the results as found in the publication. The files hosted at https://github.com/yesdavid/CulturalTaxonomies_FinalPalaeolithic are the development versions and may have changed since the paper was published.
Felix Riede, David N. Matzig, Miguel Biard, Philippe Crombé, Federica Fontana, Daniel Groß, Thomas Hess, Mathieu Langlais, Javier Fernández-Lopéz de Pablo, Ludovic Mevel, William Mills, Martin Moník, Nicolas Naudinot, Caroline Posch, Tomas Rimkus, Damian Stefański, Hans Vandendriessche, Shumon T. Hussain (2024) A quantitative analysis of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy and evolution in Europe. PLoS ONE 19(3): e0299512. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299512.
Archaeological systematics, together with spatial and chronological information, are commonly used to infer cultural evolutionary dynamics in the past. For the study of the Palaeolithic, and particularly the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic, proposed changes in material culture are often interpreted as reflecting historical processes, migration, or cultural adaptation to climate change and resource availability. Yet, cultural taxonomic practice is known to be variable across research history and academic traditions, and few large-scale replicable analyses across such traditions have been undertaken. Drawing on recent developments in computational archaeology, we here present a data-driven assessment of the existing Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy in Europe. Our dataset consists of a large expert-sourced compendium of key sites, lithic toolkit composition, blade and bladelet production technology, as well as lithic armatures. The dataset comprises 16 regions and 86 individually named archaeological taxa (‘cultures’), covering the period between ca. 15,000 and 11,000 years ago (cal BP). Using these data, we explore to what extent the dynamics observed in different lithic data domains (toolkits, technologies, armature shapes) correspond to each other and to the culture-historical relations of taxonomic units implied by traditional naming practice. Our analyses support the widespread conception that some dimensions of material culture became more diverse towards the end of the Pleistocene and the very beginning of the Holocene. At the same time, cultural taxonomic unit coherence and efficacy appear variable, leading us to explore potential biases introduced by regional research traditions, inter-analyst variation, and the role of disjunct macroevolutionary processes. In discussing the implications of these findings for narratives of cultural change and diversification across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, we emphasize the increasing need for cooperative research and systematic archaeological meta-analyses.
Final Palaeolithic; lithic technology; archaeological culture; systematics; geometric morphometrics; macro-archaeology; hunter-gatherers
This repository contains data (1_data) and code (2_scripts) for the paper. After downloading, the results can be reproduced using .Rproj and the existing folder structure. The required packages and their versions which have been used in this study are listed below and in the DESCRIPTION-file. All analyses and visualisations presented in this paper were prepared in R 4.2.2 under Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (64-bit).
ape (>= 5.7-1), data.table (>= 1.14.8), dendextend (>= 1.17.1), dispRity (>= 1.7.0), dplyr (>= 1.1.2), dummies (>= 1.5.6), e1071 (>= 1.7-13), ecodist (>= 2.0.9), forcats (>= 1.0.0), future (>= 1.32.0), future.apply (>= 1.10.0), geosphere (>= 1.5-18), ggplot2 (>= 3.4.2), ggpointgrid (>= 1.2.0), ggtree (>= 3.6.2), magrittr (>= 2.0.3), mgcv (>= 1.8-42), Momocs (>= 1.4.0), nlme (>= 3.1-162), parallel (>= 4.3.1), phangorn (>= 2.11.1), phytools (>= 1.5-1), randomcoloR (>= 1.1.0.1), raster (>= 3.6-20), readr (>= 2.1.4), reshape2 (>= 1.4.4), rgeos (>= 0.6-2), rworldmap (>= 1.3-6), scales (>= 1.2.1), sp (>= 1.6-0), splitstackshape (>= 1.4.8), tictoc (>= 1.2), vegan (>= 2.6-4)
These particular package versions can be downloaded and installed from the Posit Package Manager via the install_packages.R script provided in this repository. Alternatively, users can download and employ the CultTaxFinalPal.sif Singularity/Apptainer container provided on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10061126). To use the Singularity file interactively, use the following command: singularity exec CultTaxFinalPal.sif R.
Code: MIT http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT year: 2023, copyright holder: David Nicolas Matzig