Into the tangled web of culture-history and convergent evolution

Abstract

The themes explored in this book revolve around the related areas of convergent (independent) evolution of particular forms of material culture, the notion and recognition of populations in prehistory, and issues of taxonomy (such as ‘technocomplexes’ and ‘industries’) that archaeologists debate as the subject moves (generally) beyond culture-historical interpretations. Another recent volume explored convergent evolution in lithic technologies (O’Brien et al. 2018a). My aim here is to complement such research and push it into debates on ‘populations’ and archaeological taxonomy across space and time. In the first part of this introduction I describe the background and context of this volume. I subsequently describe the individual chapters.