Technology as Human Social Tradition outlines a novel approach to studying variability and cumulative change in human technology―prominent research themes in both archaeology and anthropology. Peter Jordan argues that human material culture is best understood as an expression of social tradition. In this approach, each artifact stands as an output of a distinctive operational sequence with specific choices made at each stage in its production. Jordan also explores different material culture traditions that are propagated through social learning, factors that promote coherent lineages of tradition to form, and the extent to which these cultural lineages exhibit congruence with one another and with language history. Drawing on the application of cultural transmission theory to empirical research, Jordan develops a descent-with-modification perspective on the technology of Northern Hemisphere hunter-gatherers. Case studies from indigenous societies in Northwest Siberia, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and Northern California provide cross-cultural insights related to the evolution of material culture traditions at different social and spatial scales. This book promises new ways of exploring some of the primary factors that generate human cultural diversity in the deep past and through to the present. "Peter Jordan has written what I believe will come to be recognised as one of the most influential books in evolutionary anthropology and archaeology of this decade. It is important as it nimbly engages with what is arguably the fundamental concern of a significant number of social anthropologists and archaeologists, that of how the complex interactions between social structure and human agency contribute to the development of cultural traditions." ― Antiquity Published On: 2015-12-01 "Peter Jordan has written what I believe will come to be recognised as one of the most influential books in evolutionary anthropology and archaeology of this decade. It is important as it nimbly engages with what is arguably the fundamental concern of a significant number of social anthropologists and archaeologists, that of how the complex interactions between social structure and human agency contribute to the development of cultural traditions." ― Antiquity Published On: 2015-12-01 Peter Jordan is Director of the Arctic Centre at the University of Groningen and author of Material Culture and Sacred Landscape (2003), editor of Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia (2011), and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (2014) and Ceramics before Farming (2009). Jordan is also series coeditor for Archaeology of the North with Cambridge University Press. Technology as Human Social Tradition Cultural Transmission among Hunter-Gatherers By Peter Jordan UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-520-27693-2 Contents Preface, Acknowledgments, Note on Data Sets, 1. Introduction, 2. Methodology, 3. Northwest Siberia, 4. Pacific Northwest Coast, 5. Northern California, 6. Conclusions, Appendix: Mantel Matrix Correlations, References, Index, CHAPTER 1 Introduction UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGY AS A HUMAN SOCIAL TRADITION One definitive feature of the human condition is reliance on highly sophisticated technological solutions. These physical objects are termed material culture and include elaborate tools for capturing, processing, and storing resources, technologies for travel, vernacular architecture, as well as all the other objects used by people in all spheres of social life. In general, however, people tend not to invent such objects and technologies for themselves through personal trial-and-error learning but predominantly acquire existing designs and cultural ideas from other people. Nor is this a relatively new phenomenon, linked only to the rise of modern urban and industrial life. Even in small-scale hunting and gathering societies, people primarily learn how to make useful things from other individuals during childhood and adolescence. And, of course, they may also add their innovations and improvements to these designs later on in life, passing these changes on to later generations. People actively participate in the reproduction of such cultural knowledge, and most technologies used by humans form long-term historical tradition that are passed on to others through exactly this kind of social learning. As anthropologists and archaeologists frequently document, these enduring lineages of cultural tradition can extend in recognizable formats over many, many generations, in some cases persisting for millennia. But if these material culture traditions are reproduced through social learning, then whom people learn from, what they learn, why, and when can all have major cumulative effects on larger patterns of cultural diversity and change. In one way