EUROEVOL
Boom
and bust
Extensive archaeological studies are providing new evidence for the links between population
fluctuations and cultural change. Professor Stephen Shennan discusses the relevance of these
findings for informing social, cultural and economic modelling of both the past and present
How are you integrating cultural
evolutionary theory and method?
There are increasing numbers of archaeological
studies that have focused on a single process,
such as modelling the factors affecting
the transmission of artefact style, from an
evolutionary perspective. Bringing together
different sub-fields of cultural evolutionary
theory and method in a case study depends on
collecting a range of data relating to different
aspects of past economy, society and culture
so that the relations between them can be
explored. This is extremely time consuming
and therefore expensive. It is only funding on
the scale of the European Research Council
Advanced Grants that makes this possible.
What progress have you made since the
EUROEVOL project started in 2010?
Project members have devoted most of their
time to data collection. This has involved
building a database of more than 13,000
radiocarbon dates and establishing the grid
references of the sites concerned so that we
can carry out spatial analysis of the data. In
addition, we have been collecting information
on plant and animal remains from excavated
sites to reconstruct the changing subsistence
economy, as well as on movement of raw
materials (such as stone for axes) and on
variation in material culture (such as pottery
and ornament styles as evidence for patterns of
social interaction).
The key to the work is the reconstruction of
population patterns. This has involved the
development of a new method for using
radiocarbon dating as a demographic proxy
and testing the resulting patterns for statistical
significance. We have shown a striking pattern
of boom and bust.
Who makes up the EUROEVOL Network,
and what skills do these individuals add to
the investigation?
The core of the Network is the team of
postdoctoral fellows employed by the
project. This includes specialists in the
analysis of archaeological faunal and
botanical assemblages; radiocarbon
dating; material culture and sites of the
European Neolithic period; and modelling,
data analysis and databases. Currently,
there are four full-time and two part-time
postdoctoral research assistants.
In addition, we collaborate closely with
Professor Mark Thomas of University College
London (UCL) – a geneticist, who provides
relevant population genetics expertise – and
Dr Anne Kandler of City University, London,
who is a mathematician. We have also worked
with Dr Andy Bevan from the Institute of
Archaeology, UCL, who is a specialist in spatial
analysis; Dr Jutta Lechterbeck from Germany,
a pollen analysis specialist; and Professor Neil
Roberts and his team from the University
of Plymouth whose environmental history
project called ‘Deforesting Europe’ provides
data on the history of human impacts on the
environment, representing an independent
source of evidence to cross-check our
demographic reconstructions.
To what extent is a collaborative and
multidisciplinary approach important to this
type of study?
Basically, the project would be a non-starter
without the integration of all these different
areas of expertise. All areas of archaeological
and environmental evidence require very
specific knowledge if they are to be used
correctly – obviously an absolute requirement
before the relationships between them can
be explored. Statistical modelling has to be
tailor-made to the problems being addressed
and this cannot be achieved simply by using
standard packages.
Can your methods be applied to inform
societal modelling of any period and region?
It has been possible to show links between
changing population density and the incidence
of violence, the scale of flint-mining and early
metal exchange, and it is also apparent in
a number of cases that the rise and decline
of regional cultures is associated with that
of regional populations. This approach can
certainly be used to inform the modelling
of social, cultural and economic systems in
any region and period, including the present.
I would hope that our work can be a kind of
model case study that specialists investigating
other periods and areas would be interested
in following. In this sense, I think what is most
significant is putting population at the core of
the system and asking: what causes population
booms and busts, and what consequences do
they have? This is very relevant to the global
future, in which the world population will soon
reach 10 billion, as well as to the past.
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EUROEVOL
Charting cultural evolution
Researchers involved in the EUROEVOL project are employing a novel evolutionary perspective and
advanced statistical techniques to delve into how farming helped to transform early European societies
THE LAST TWO decades have seen an
emergence of new interdisciplinary research
looking at how cultures have evolved. In
particular, these have focused on using Darwin’s
theory of evolution to understand more about
how human societies and cultures have
changed and advanced over time. This crosscutting field offers the potential for exciting
insights into how humans have developed
throughout history.
As the archaeological record provides factual
information and data on social change over a
long period, there is great potential to build on
existing knowledge from a new evolutionary
perspective and reveal previously unknown
information. This fresh approach is being
applied by the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic
Europe (EUROEVOL) team which is aiming to
identify links between demographic, economic,
social and cultural patterns and processes
by bringing together a number of different
disciplines and applying these to large-scale
case studies in history.
STUDYING EARLY FARMING
POPULATIONS
Project coordinator Professor Stephen Shennan
from the Institute of Archaeology, University
College London in the UK explains how the
theory of evolution can be applied to human
behaviour: “Just as Darwin’s theory provides a
framework that links studies of dinosaur fossils
with investigations of primate behaviour and
the development of drug-resistant bacteria,
so the cultural adaptations of that theory
link studies of changing pottery types with
100INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION
psychological experiments and sociolinguistics,
enabling microscale social and psychological
mechanisms to be linked to longer term
adaptation and history”.
The EUROEVOL group is using this approach
to investigate how farming helped to change
Western European societies during the period
circa 6000-2000 BC. This timeframe is
significant because it covers the introduction of
farming, which began around 7,500 years ago in
Central Europe and 6,000 years ago in the North
West, and runs until the beginning of the Bronze
Age, about 4,000 years ago in this region.
The investigators are focusing on farming
because it is widely agreed to be the most
fundamental development in human history
until the Industrial Revolution, as Shennan
explains: “It made possible much larger
populations, changed human diets and laid the
foundations for more complex and hierarchical
societies”. Aiming to highlight some of the
benefits and weaknesses of linking the use of
cultural evolutionary theory and methods to
look at long-term change, EUROEVOL mainly
focuses on the history of human populations
because this is at the intersection of many
key issues. “For example, economic factors
such as the development of farming can lead
to population expansion, which can create
new opportunities for innovation, new forms
of social organisation and result in the spread
of new languages with their speakers,” notes
Shennan. By studying and reconstructing the
population histories of early European societies
over the long term, the researchers can explore
how and why those patterns formed.
DEVELOPING NOVEL
STATISTICAL METHODS
Most of the work centres around archaeological
data, which are fundamentally quantitative
in nature. This means that corresponding
methods of data analysis are needed to
enable the researchers to identify patterns. In
addition, the location and date of these data
are important to help understand how cultures
evolved. The team is using spatial and temporal
forms of analysis to interpret this information
and has adopted a new approach which models
the processes thought to underlie the patterns
seen and compares the outcomes with
real-world information. This process allows
the researchers to identify any statistically
significant differences.
An example of how the team’s methods are
being put into practice can be seen in its study
of the demographic impact of the arrival of
farming. One of the challenges the group had
to overcome is that the measure they use as
a demographic proxy – the number of sites
present at a given time dated by the radiocarbon
method – does not have a linear relationship
with calendar years. To overcome this difficulty,
they created a novel way to test the significance
of departures in the data from the long-term
exponential trend in human populations, taking
into account the nonlinearity of radiocarbon
time in relation to real time.
The group has also successfully improved the
methods which have been used over the last
decade to test the neutral model of cultural
transmission, recently publishing the results
Reconstructed demography for
four different regions of the UK and
Ireland, 8,000-4,000 years ago.
The black line shows the pattern of
long-term exponential increase in
population that is to be expected on
the basis of continental and global
population trends. The red areas
mark periods when population was
significantly higher than expected
on the basis of the long-term trend,
the green areas periods when it was
lower. Farming, and most probably
farmers themselves, arrived in the UK
and Ireland circa 6,000 years ago.
in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. “This is
a model derived from population genetics,
extensively used in evolutionary archaeology
in recent years, that generates the frequency of
different cultural traits under the assumption
that they are not under any kind of selection,”
adds Shennan.
REVOLUTIONISING ASSUMPTIONS
ABOUT HUMAN HISTORY
This work has the potential to transform
the way early human history is viewed. The
innovative methods Shennan and his team
use to obtain and analyse data about past
cultures provide valuable new evidence for how
societies developed and evolved in early Europe,
and in theory for other societies. A paper by
EUROEVOL researchers presenting evidence
of demographic booms and busts in Neolithic
Europe has just been accepted by Nature
Communications. This kind of information
has previously been inaccessible because it
requires appropriate analysis of data with a high
level of chronological resolution. Far from the
prehistoric past being static and unchanging,
the results point towards a past that was far
more dynamic than generally assumed.
There are two main reasons why this work is
pioneering. First, the theoretical framework
of cultural evolution, and consequently the
history of human populations, is still being
developed. Second, if population is crucial then
a reliable method to reconstruct population
history is needed, as Shennan elaborates:
“This has been a controversial subject in
archaeology but new data are becoming
available and new techniques are increasingly
making it possible to use the data, including
new statistical methods that we have been
developing in EUROEVOL to use radiocarbon
dates as a proxy for population”. This research
has demonstrated that high population levels
in early farming systems were not maintained
and, for the first time, shown a pattern of
prosperity and decline in Neolithic populations
that is not linked to a changing climate.
EUROEVOL will be entering its final stage next
year. The researchers’ task in the remaining
time will be to continue to explore the
relationships between the population histories
that are being reconstructed for different
regions of Europe and the social, economic
and cultural patterns being characterised.
Shennan is now in a position to start thinking
about possible aspects of this topic to follow
up with future research projects. For instance,
more work is needed to understand the social,
cultural and economic factors at play following
regional collapse in populations.
Far from the prehistoric past being static and
unchanging, the results point towards a past that
was far more dynamic than generally assumed
INTELLIGENCE
CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF NEOLITHIC
EUROPE (EUROEVOL)
OBJECTIVES
To answer the following questions:
• How did regional population patterns change
circa 6000-2000 BC?
• What are the links between subsistence,
climate change and social institutions, on the
one hand, and population patterns on the
other? Do the population patterns reflect
periods of economic growth and decline?
• To what extent were population fluctuations
the main source of cultural change?
• What are the links between cultural patterns
in space, for example monumental and
ceramic traditions, and the nature and extent
of social interaction?
• Is it possible to identify the existence of longstanding cultural ‘cores’ subject to descent with
modification in different times and places, or is
a model of different distinct cultural ‘packages’
more appropriate?
KEY COLLABORATORS
Professor Mark Thomas, Genetics, Evolution
and Environment, University College London,
UK • Dr Sean Downey, Department of
Anthropology, University of Maryland, USA •
Dr Anne Kandler, Mathematics Centre, City
University, London, UK • Dr Jutta Lechterbeck,
Baden-Württemberg Landesdenkmalamt,
Germany • Professor Neil Roberts; Dr
Ralph Fyfe; Dr Jessie Woodbridge, School of
Geography, University of Plymouth, UK
FUNDING
European Research Council Advanced Grant
#249390
CONTACT
Professor Stephen Shennan
Principal Investigator
Director, Institute of Archaeology
University College London
31-34 Gordon Square
London
WC1H 0PY, UK
T +44 207 679 7483
E s.shennan@ucl.ac.uk
www.ucl.ac.uk/euroevol/EUROEVOL/Home.
html
PROFESSOR STEPHEN SHENNAN received
his BA and PhD in Archaeology from the
University of Cambridge. He then held a number
of positions at the University of Southampton.
In 1996, Shennan moved to the Institute of
Archaeology, University College London as
Professor of Theoretical Archaeology. 2005
saw him become Director of the Institute of
Archaeology, and the following year he was
made a Fellow of the British Academy. Since the
late 1980s, his interests have mainly focused on
exploring the use of method and theory from the
study of biological evolution to understanding
cultural stability and change.
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