Shennan, Stephen;
(2024)
Population, culture history, and the dynamics of change in European prehistory☆.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
10.1111/1467-9655.14153.
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Abstract
Despite many attacks on its shortcomings, culture history has remained in practice the dominant framework for describing and interpreting European prehistory. It has gained even more salience in recent years because the new information coming from ancient DNA about the genetic ancestry of individuals in prehistory seems to show that this correlates closely with the cultural affiliation of the archaeological material with which they are found, raising concerns that old and discredited links between biological and cultural identity are being revived. This article argues that exploring the links between cultural and genetic ancestry does not need to fall into these errors if it takes its theory and methods from the discipline of cultural evolution and rejects characterization of the relationship in terms of ‘ethnic groups’. This involves describing the archaeological record in more fine‐grained, less essentialist ways and at the same time linking the archaeological and genetic patterns to histories of the rise and decline of populations and the interactions between them.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Population, culture history, and the dynamics of change in European prehistory☆ |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/1467-9655.14153 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14153 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024 The Authors. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Anthropology, CORDED WARE CULTURE, LAND-USE, DEMOGRAPHY, MIGRATION, IMPACT, PROXY, SETTLEMENTS, SIMULATION, STEPPE, GREECE |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology > Institute of Archaeology Gordon Square |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10192553 |
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