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Coarse Grained Models of Cultural Transmission
Project Description
Coarse grained models of cultural transmission are those which describe transmission with lower granularity than individual-based or intra-population models, summarizing the results of social learning over larger structures, or aggregated over spans of time instead of making point observations. A coarse grained model may also introduce observation units which are aggregates of the information actually passed by individuals during social learning. Coarse grained models will allow us to make contact with, and explain, phenomena which are not at the same scale as our detailed individual-level models of cultural transmission and social learning.
The classic modeling work by Boyd and Richerson, or Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, is comparatively "fine-grained," in that models describe stable equilibria achieved in comparatively short time intervals, with observations made upon individuals and their traits. The observed traits, in a fine-grained model, are the same units of information which are copied and imitated by individuals. Such models follow the structural framework of theoretical population genetics, or more rarely, epidemiology. Their analysis typically leads to an understanding of "ecological time" dynamics, and the equilibria of the random process(es) describing the model.
Fine grained models form the basis for nearly all archaeological discussion of CT today, despite the fact that archaeologists deal with a highly aggregated, often "time averaged" record of past artifactual discard and human behavioral traces. Several decades of formation process studies, taphonomic studies of a variety of materials and artifact classes, and a growing appreciation of the limits that the sedimentary record places upon the questions we can ask (i.e., "time perspectivism") should be informing our efforts to adapt fine grained cultural transmission models to archaeological use, but to date little or no attention has been given to bridging the gap between "ecological" or "human" time, and the spatiotemporal scales over which archaeological evidence of human culture can inform us.
This problem is identical to that faced by paleobiologists who seek to provide evolutionary explanations of the fossil record, although the massive temporal aggregation characteristic of that record has largely led to a bifurcation between "micro" and "macroevolutionary" questions and models. Archaeological evidence (construed broadly), on the other hand, is capable of informing us about cultural change on time scales ranging from years to millennia, and thus we need to consider a continuum of relations between "micro" and "macro," rather than simply bifurcating our questions and theories.
Our problem is thus structurally similar to scaling or "renormalization" problems in physics, where microscopic descriptions of phenomena often need to be aggregated and understood at a variety of observational scales. Processes critical to understanding observations at high energies (and thus, sub-atomic scales) are invisible when a system is viewed at the molecular and atomic scales (and thus, lower energies), and have only statistical effects when a system is viewed at a bulk or macroscopic scale (e.g., a ferromagnetic sample of iron). At each successive scale, we construct a "coarse grained" description of the system by summarizing and "averaging over" detail at the lower level.
I am engaged in a project to study the properties of common cultural transmission models as we "coarse grain" them in various ways:
- temporal aggregation
- spatial or population aggregation
- classificatory aggregation of observation units
- all of the above, since this is what we see in in the empirical record.
Deliverables
This project forms the basis of my Ph.D. dissertation research at the University of Washington. The results of these researches will be released in the form of 3-4 published or in press papers, along with a dissertation document outlining the background for the research and research methods.
One paper, an initial examination of temporal aggregation or "time averaging" upon the classic neutral model adapted by Neiman from Sewall Wright, Motoo Kimura, and others, has been submitted to the _Journal of Anthropological Archaeology_, and was presented at the 2012 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. [PREPRINT]