Simulating cultural transmission: preliminary results and their implications for the study of formal variability of material culture in the Central Balkan Neolithic

Abstract

 In this paper, we adopt the theoretical framework of evolutionary archaeology in order to model and simulate cultural transmission between hypothetical Neolithic sites in Balkans. We simulate neutral cultural transmission in order to compare the simulation results with empirically observed patterns of material culture variability such as traditional archaeological cultures. Our preliminary results show that a series of random local interactions can result in spatial groupings of typologically similar assemblages that correspond to the spatial distributions of traditional archaeological cultures, even in the absence of any other ‘external’ factor such as an overarching regional political structure or shared collective identity.