Simulating Geographical Variation in Material Culture: Were Early Modern Humans in Europe Ethnically Structured?

Abstract

A high degree of structuring is seen in the spatial distribution of symbolic artefact types associated with the Aurignacian culture in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, particularly the degree of sharing of ornament types across archaeological sites. Multivariate analyses of these distributions have been interpreted as indicating ethno-linguistic differentiation (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006), although simpler explanations such as isolation-by-distance have not been formally discounted. In this study we have developed a spatiotemporally explicit cultural transmission simulation model that generates expectations of a range of spatial statistics describing the distribution of shared ornament types. We compare these simulated spatial statistics to those observed from archaeological data for Aurignacian Europe—using Approximate Bayesian Computation—in order to test and compare a range of hypotheses concerning group interaction dynamics for the period. Among the set of hypotheses examined, we include ones where material culture does or does not drive group interaction dynamics.