At any one time in the Palaeolithic, children constituted the largest group of individuals in a given community. While not many objects ascribed to children are known from these remote periods, it is beyond doubt that children participated in many aspects of daily life, including knapping. These youngsters played a vital role in generating technological variation and in societal adaptation. We here focus on the role of children in Northern European Final Palaeolithic societies that experienced markedly different climatic regimes in order to better understand how youngsters and their playful, exploratory learning may have contributed to adaptation. Using a mixed-methods approach we study inexperienced knappers with emphasis on three distinct groups of flintwork: blades, cores, and projectile points. We apply 2D geometric morphometrics coupled with technological attributes, quantitative and qualitative analyses to interrogate the variability within these groups with the aim of tracing the possible work of children through notions of skill level and artefact scaling. The purpose of this analysis is to investigate (i) how we can identify the signatures of children knapping flint, and (ii) how children’s participation in flintwork varied between inventories from periods characterised by distinctly different climates. Finally, to better understand the role of children in innovation and adaptation, we discuss how children’s knapping relates to the generation of technological variability, innovation, and differences in adaptation. The combined analytical focus on blades, points and cores allow us to more securely identify evidence for children, allowing us to compare their contributions to cultural variability across the two time periods.

Phylogenetic models are commonly used in palaeobiology to study the patterns and processes of organismal evolution. In the human sciences, phylogenetic methods have been deployed for reconstructing ancestor-descendant relationships using linguistic and material culture data. Within evolutionary archaeology specifically, phylogenetic analyses based on maximum parsimony and discrete traits dominate, which sets limitations for the downstream role cultural phylogenies, once derived, can play in more elaborate analytical pipelines. Recent methodological advances in Bayesian phylogenetics, however, now allow us to infer evolutionary dynamics using continuous characters. Capitalizing on these developments, we here present an exploratory analysis of cultural macroevolution of projectile point shape evolution in the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (approx. 15 000-11 000 BP) using a Bayesian phylodynamic approach and the fossilized birth-death process model. This model-based approach leaps far beyond the application of parsimony, in that it not only produces a tree, but also divergence times, and diversification rates while incorporating uncertainties. This allows us to compare rates to the pronounced climatic changes that occurred during our time frame. While common in cultural evolutionary analyses of language, the extension of Bayesian phylodynamic models to archaeology arguably represents a major methodological breakthrough.

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 use geometric morphometric and multivariate statistical techniques to 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 analyses that reach across research traditions.

Originally developed for the quantitative analysis of organismal shapes, both two‐dimensional (2D) and 3D geometric morphometric methods (GMMs) have recently gained some prominence in archaeology for the analysis of stone tools—unquestionably the primary deep‐time data source for the earliest periods of human cultural evolution. The key strength of GMM rests in its ability to statistically quantify and hence qualify complex shapes, which in turn can be used to infer social interaction, function, reduction, as well as to assess classification systems and cultural relatedness. The methodological diversification that has accompanied the rise in popularity of this particular suite of methods has, however, also resulted in an increasing lack of comparability and interoperability, which—ironically—works against the promise of GMM to provide a tool for comparing artifact shapes that is not sensitive to interanalyst variation. Standardized protocols, vetted datasets, as well as case‐ transferable and fully reproducible methods do not currently exist, hampering the full utility of geometric morphometrics as an approach to comparatively understand human behavior as reflected in these lithic proxies. Additionally, the emerging issue of methodological diversity in the geometric morphometric analysis of stone tools is further compounded by issues related to landmark selection. When applied to organisms, landmark selection is guided by a priori knowledge about ontogeny, homology, and function. For stone tools, however, only very few such evident landmarks suggest themselves. Instead, many studies have used landmarks selected specifically to highlight particular design features of a given tool class (e.g., stemmed points or leaf points). These cannot, however, be easily compared across tool classes. Other studies have used sets of equidistant landmarks measured perpendicularly from a given tool's longest axis to its margins to describe overall shape. In this context, whole‐outline geometric morphometrics offers an alternative approach that circumvents landmark selection by describing the entire outline of the recorded artifact. It is computationally tractable, readily replicable, and well‐suited for 2D object representations such as drawings and photographs, many of which exist in excavation reports, catalogs, finds registers and the published literature at large. Furthermore, emerging approaches in paleobiology now allow such continuous shape data to be used in phylogenetic applications, opening up the possibility of effectively combining stone tool geometric morphometrics with cultural phylogenetics in one workflow.

Bibliometrics offers powerful means of visualising and understanding trends within research domains. We here present a first exploratory bibliometric analysis of cultural evolutionary theory and attendant methods as applied specifically within archaeology across the last four decades (1981–2021). Bibliographic coupling network analysis shows that there exists a broadly successive series of author clusters making up the core of this research domain. A broader vernacular version of cultural evolution is also commonly used in thematic or regional research traditions that fall outside of cultural evolutionary studies in the strict sense. Our bibliometric networks trace the development of evolutionary archaeology over the last four decades and while they demonstrate the centrality of computational models, they also suggest a stagnation in the application of precisely that suite of methods—phylogenetics—that is central to evolutionary archaeology’s biological counterpart palaeontology. Recent methodological innovations in palaeobiology are, however, offering new ways of integrating artefact shape data directly with phylogenetic applications. This development may usher in a renaissance in artefact phylogenetics and appropriately marco-scale applications of cultural evolutionary theory in archaeology.

Comparative macro-archaeological investigations of the human deep past rely on the availability of unified, quality-checked datasets integrating different layers of observation. Information on the durable and ubiquitous record of Paleolithic stone artefacts and technological choices are especially pertinent to this endeavour. We here present a large expert-sourced collaborative dataset for the study of stone tool technology and artefact shape evolution across Europe between ~15.000 and 11.000 years before present. The dataset contains a compendium of key sites from the study period, and data on lithic technology and toolkit composition at the level of the cultural taxa represented by those sites. The dataset further encompasses 2D shapes of selected lithic artefact groups (armatures, endscrapers, and borers/perforators) shared between cultural taxa. These data offer novel possibilities to explore between-regional patterns of material culture change to reveal scale-dependent processes of long-term technological evolution in mobile hunter-gatherer societies at the end of the Pleistocene. Our dataset facilitates state-of-the-art quantitative analyses and showcases the benefits of collaborative data collation and synthesis.

The twentieth century saw two modes of thinking spread through biological systematics: population thinking and tree thinking. Many archaeologists investigating ancient technologies have adopted the population thinking approach for archaeological systematics, as evident from the rise of work on quantifiable, attribute-based patterns of diversity in studies of past technological systems, much of it driven by application of geometric morphometrics. Yet, tree thinking, as one of the central concepts of phylogenetic biology, remains rare in the archaeological sciences. We review some of the obstacles that have impeded the uptake of this concept by archaeologists. Some of these are conceptual, but we also identify one specific methodological obstacle: the prevailing use of discrete character traits in phylogenetic analysis. This is a major challenge for archaeological applications where standardised trait-analytical protocols are scarce. To address this challenge, we present a case study that demonstrates a Bayesian framework for inferring phylogenies using continuous traits derived from artefact shape coefficients obtained via outline based geometric morphometrics. We use a previously published sample of Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age arrowheads from Northwestern Europe to demonstrate the efficacy and accessibility of our approach. We also sketch out the potential for phylogenetic comparative methods to address archaeological questions. From https://github.com/benmarwick/bayesinfmatcultphylo

Studies on prehistoric osseous barbed points have relied heavily on typology in linking presumed types to broader techno-complexes, and for making chronological inferences. The accumulation of both new finds and of radiocarbon dates obtained directly on such artefacts, however, has revealed that (i) shape variability defies neat typological divisions, and that (ii) chronological inferences based on typology often fail. To further query these issues and to better understand the design choices and cultural evolutionary dynamics within this artefact class, we present a 2D open-outline geometric morphometric analysis of 50 directly dated Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene osseous barbed points primarily from northern and western Europe. The results indicate that (a) different components (tip, base, and barbs) of these artefacts were subject to varying design constraints and that (b) there is no clear-cut distinction between Final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic point traditions. Different techno-functional components evolved at various rates while specimens assigned to the same type and/or techno-complex are only occasionally morphologically similar. The results reflect a relatively low level of normativity for this artefact class and likely a repeated convergence on similar design elements. We propose that interpretations linked to cultural dynamics, individual craft agency, and repeated convergence on locally optimal designs may offer more satisfying avenues for thinking about the barbed points of this period.

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.

Geometric morphometric methods (GMM) in archaeology are experiencing a sharp increase in application and popularity since the last decade or so and seem to be more popular now than ever. In general, they constitute a major advance vis-à-vis earlier qualitative descriptions, typological assessment, or linear measurements of artefacts. GMM approaches can be divided into methods that use landmarks, and those that use trigonometric descriptions of whole outlines. The bulk of archaeological applications of GMM have so far relied on landmark-based approaches, although a surge of recent studies is demonstrating the utility of whole-outline approaches using so-called elliptical Fourier analysis and cognate approaches. There currently exist various standalone software applications as well as some R-packages for the extraction and analysis of landmarks and whole-outlines. However, the extraction step always involves a considerable amount of manual processing and manual tracking of either the landmarks or whole-outlines, which proves to be the definite bottleneck of many studies. In this protocoll I introduce the R-package outlineR (Matzig 2021) that allows a fast and efficient extraction of whole-outlines from multiple artefacts on images, as well as all necessary preparatory steps that lead up to it. References Barthelme et al. 2020: Barthelme, S., Tschumperle, D., Wijffels, J., Assemlal, H. E., & Ochi, S. (2020). imager: Image Processing Library Based on “CImg” (0.42.3) [Computer software]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=imager Bonhomme et al. 2014: Bonhomme, V., Picq, S., Gaucherel, C., & Claude, J. (2014). Momocs: Outline Analysis Using R. Journal of Statistical Software, 56(13). https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v056.i13 Matzig 2021: outlineR: An R package to derive outline shapes from (multiple) artefacts on JPEG images. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.4527469 Pau et al. 2010: Pau, G., Fuchs, F., Sklyar, O., Boutros, M., & Huber, W. (2010). EBImage—An R package for image processing with applications to cellular phenotypes. Bioinformatics, 26(7), 979–981. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btq046

CLIOARCH is an ERC Consolidator Grant project and has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 817564).

In the past numerous concepts of urbanity have been discussed and a variety of criteria for towns have been developed. They include size, population, legal aspects, way of life, structural and functional approaches. However, since the mentioned criteria cover only a part of the phenomenon and partly use fixed and arbitrary thresholds, they are not sufficient for analysis. We turn to an understanding of urbanity as a process that creates and shapes the scenery of the buildings and people and that is mainly driven by complexity. In this sense, we understand urbanity as a process of adaptation to changing conditions or contexts in a complex settlement system, which is triggered by size, attracted by exemplary solutions and characterized by the emergence of new structures. In this paper we address the issue of relative centrality as proposed by Christaller in the urbanity process as well as centrality within a network sciences approach. Our aim is to interweave different concepts of urbanity, centrality, interaction and connectivity, combining different concepts and research traditions as well as expanding them, resulting in a collection of different terminological frameworks. In the context of adaptation, urbanity is relative in the sense that different places may have gained better or worse adaptation under different conditions. The urbanity process is always shaped by the threat of too much complexity and too little connectivity. Above all, it is a certain surplus of connectivity that characterizes urbanity. This surplus is mapped by the variant of centrality proposed by Christaller. While Christaller's models can be transferred into network sciences frameworks, Christaller does not offer an adequate centrality measure. Therefore, his concept of centrality cannot be transferred correctly without being translated carefully into the network research context. In this article, we argue why this is necessary and explain how it can be done. In this paper the above concept will be applied to the Early Iron Age Princely Seats with a special focus on the Heuneburg. In order to represent similarities and interaction between different nodes a very limited part of the material culture can be used. For this purpose we use fibulae which allow for fairly accurate dating and hence ensure a narrow time slice for the network analysis. Using Fibulae the research will be limited to a certain social segment, which we refer to as “middle class.” This paper is intended to deal with the rather complex issue of urbanity using more simple approaches such as network analysis. In this context, we pursue a tight integration of theory and methodology and we consider certain conceptual issues. This paper has two main results. Firstly, we develop a consistent approach in order to apply social network centrality measures on geographical networks. Secondly, we will analyse which role the above mentioned middle class played in the course of urbanity processes.