Papers by Stephen Shennan
A Haunting Spectre – Archaeological Studies of Social Organisation, Economic Practice, and Inequality A Festschrift for Johannes Müller on the occasion of his 65th birthday, 2025
The aim of this paper is to argue that ritual knowledge
has been under-rated as a source of socia... more The aim of this paper is to argue that ritual knowledge
has been under-rated as a source of social inequality,
defined as ‘those differences that are imposed on individuals
(or classes of individuals) by structural features
of a social system’ (Smith et al. 2023, 1). Far from being a
mere means of legitimation of power based on material
foundations it can itself be the foundation from which
material power flows. After reviewing some evidence of
the importance of ritual knowledge as property I link
its importance to Marshall Sahlins’s (2022) argument
that, until recently at least, most people lived in what he
has called an ‘enchanted universe’. In this context, power
differentials and social inequality can exist in societies
that lack the material distinctions usually associated
with them. In developing this proposal, I then return
to an argument I first made many years ago (Shennan
1996) about the importance of ritual knowledge and
cultural transmission in the creation of inequality in
hunter-gatherer societies, before reviewing more recent
work on this topic and concluding.
Vertebrate paleobiology and paleoanthropology series, 2020
Recent evolutionary approaches to the understanding of lithic variability take us back to longsta... more Recent evolutionary approaches to the understanding of lithic variability take us back to longstanding issues in lithic studies to do with the claimed contrast between style and function and the Binford-Bordes debate of the 1960s concerning the factors that affect interassemblage variation. In fact, the style and function contrast is an unhelpful one, not least when considering the question of convergence. Taking the definition of style as 'a way of doing', all functions are carried out in locally specific ways that have a transmission history, although the extent to which the history of the attributes relevant to the function have been subject to random drift and innovation patterns, as opposed to selection, will vary. Moreover, in a subtractive technology like lithics the extent to which a transmission signal will be visible in an attribute like the angle of a cutting edge is unclear. The contrasting view is that, in the case of lithics, functional requirements will always call into existence the technical innovations to satisfy them, which in any case are not that difficult to find. The paper addresses these and related issues with reference to previous work by Shennan and colleagues on the use of material culture to identify within and between group variation, the extent to which isolation-by-distance in space and time can account for the similarities and differences between assemblages, and the role of phylogenetic methods.
Palgrave Communications, May 28, 2019
The analysis of ancient genomes is having a major impact on archaeological interpretations. Yet, ... more The analysis of ancient genomes is having a major impact on archaeological interpretations. Yet, the methodological divide between these disciplines is substantial. Fundamentally, there is an urgent need to reconcile archaeological and genetic taxonomies. However, traditional archaeological taxonomies are problematic because they are epistemologically weak and often laden with undue assumptions about past ethnicity and demography-they are a hindrance rather than a help in such a reconciliation. Eisenmann and colleagues have recently tackled this issue, offering a palette of potential solutions that circumvents traditional archaeological culture labels. We welcome renewed attention to nomenclature but take issue with such recent work that favours systems of taxonomic assignment for genomic groups that either do not include archaeological information at all or retain traditional cultural taxonomic categories. While superficially pragmatic, these administrative solutions do not address the substantive issues that the topic raises. We here present the argument that the only analytically viable solution to aligning genetic and cultural nomenclature is to conceptualise material culture as underwritten by a system of information transmission across generations that has similar structural properties to the genetic system of information transmission. This alignment facilitates the use of similar analytical protocols and hence allows for a true parallel analysis. Once culture change is also understood as an evolutionary process, a wealth of analytical methods for reconciling archaeological and genetic clusters becomes available.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 22, 2011
Recent years have seen major advances in our understanding of the way in which cultural transmiss... more Recent years have seen major advances in our understanding of the way in which cultural transmission takes place and the factors that affect it. The theoretical foundations of those advances have been built by postulating the existence of a variety of different processes and deriving their consequences mathematically or by simulation. The operation of these processes in the real world can be studied through experiment and naturalistic observation. In contrast, archaeologists have an 'inverse problem'. For them the object of study is the residues of different behaviours represented by the archaeological record and the problem is to infer the microscale processes that produced them, a vital task for cultural evolution since this is the only direct record of past cultural patterns. The situation is analogous to that faced by population geneticists scanning large number of genes and looking for evidence of selection as opposed to drift, but more complicated for many reasons, not least the enormous variety of different forces that affect cultural transmission. This paper reviews the progress that has been made in inferring processes from patterns and the role of demography in those processes, together with the problems that have arisen.
World Archaeology, Mar 15, 2018
David Clarke's (1968) Analytical Archaeology has been seen as a pivotal work that emerged when ne... more David Clarke's (1968) Analytical Archaeology has been seen as a pivotal work that emerged when new ideas and approaches were transforming archaeology as a discipline. However, we contend that some of its key ideas have only been picked up on and given closer consideration in more recent years. At the 50th anniversary of its publication, we outline the central ideas discussed in Analytical Archaeology and evaluate its role in ongoing discussions. We conclude that in the light of recent work, which can demonstrably be seen as revisiting some of its central themes, there is much to be gained in contemporary archaeological discussion by revisiting Clarke's book.
The First Farmers of Europe
The origin and spread of farming had enormous implications for human history, and for this reason... more The origin and spread of farming had enormous implications for human history, and for this reason has long been established as one of two or three ' big questions ' about the human past. Farming has been the foundation for the development of cities and civilisations and at the time of writing supports a world population of 7.5 billion people. It has changed human biology as well as human society. It has therefore attracted an enormous amount of archaeological attention . In recent years, as archaeological research on the prehistory of the human exploitation of plants and animals has expanded on a global scale, it has become increasingly clear that there were not just three or four loci of agricultural origins but a much larger number in diff erent parts of the world, based on diff erent crops and with diff erent evolutionary histories, so we can no longer tell a single story of the origins of agriculture, or even two or three. Nevertheless , south-west Asia remains what we might call the ' locus classicus ' of agricultural origins research because the crops and animals that were domesticated there were the subsistence foundations of the early civilisations of the western Old World and their successors and thus form part of the ' grand narrative ' of the ' western ' societies. My aim in this book is to take an evolutionary perspective on understanding the interactions between population, subsistence and socio-cultural traditions that resulted in the origin of cereal agriculture in south-west Asia and its subsequent spread westwards into Europe. The book's central argument can be summarised in two claims. Farming originated because broadening their diet breadth led people to increasing sedentism through growing dependence on plant resources that were dense and sustainable; as a result they had more children and more of them survived. Farming spread because it enabled people to be reproductively successful by colonising new territories that had low-density forager populations, so long as they kept passing on the knowledge, practices, and the crops and animals themselves, to their children. The object of this introductory chapter is to present the theoretical foundations for this argument. It is based on ideas from the rapidly developing fi elds of evolutionary demography, .
Trends in Plant Science, 2021
Ornamental plants are unique as their domestication is not associated with the need for food secu... more Ornamental plants are unique as their domestication is not associated with the need for food security but rather for human aesthetic, visual and other sensory attractiveness. The new extended evolutionary theory -proposing that inheritance and evolution is not by genes alone but is affected by the environment and human socio-cultural processes, and by gene-culture coevolution -makes it possible to elucidate plants' evolution and domestication. Ornamental plant domestication and breeding is a specific aesthetics-driven dimension of human niche construction, that coevolved with socio-economic changes and new scientific technologies. The new era of ornamental plants is dependent on the application of new technologies and symbolic-to-material asset shifts, with a foundation in a human sense of beauty and aesthetic values.
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2020
The main goal of this paper is to explore possible cultural continuities and discontinuities at t... more The main goal of this paper is to explore possible cultural continuities and discontinuities at the Neolithic transition in Eastern Iberia. To address this issue we introduce a twofold methodology, consisting of Geometric Morphometrics and the use of the self-developed Geomeasure system, to examine evolutionary patterns in geometric microliths. These are a specific type of arrowhead shared by both the last huntergatherers and the first farmers from two reference sites in the region: Cueva de la Cocina and Cova de l'Or (Eastern Iberia). Although advances in research have contributed to a better comprehension of this process, there are still unanswered questions, especially when the study is approached from a regional perspective. Such is the case for the Neolithisation of the Eastern Iberian Peninsula, and the way in which the previous Mesolithic population interacted-if they interacted at all-with the first farmers. In this case, some sites present archaeological contexts that have been catalogued as acculturation contexts. This has traditionally been the case for phase C of Cueva de la Cocina (Spain), although recent research points to the possibility that the content of this specific deposit is to the result of post-depositional processes. Here we try first to understand the cultural evolutionary patterns and relations between the different geometric microlith technocomplexes and, second, to address the specific problem of the interpretation of taphonomic disturbances in the archaeological record. We use the the Cueva de l'Or and the Cueva de la Cocina for comparison, and our conclusions raise serious doubts about the existence of an acculturation phase at the latter.
Rapid rivers and slow seas? New data for the radiocarbon chronology of the Balkan peninsula
UCL logo UCL Discovery. ...
Transmission, Phylogenetics, and the Evolution of Cultural Diversity
Cultural Transmission and …, 2008
Uploads
Papers by Stephen Shennan
has been under-rated as a source of social inequality,
defined as ‘those differences that are imposed on individuals
(or classes of individuals) by structural features
of a social system’ (Smith et al. 2023, 1). Far from being a
mere means of legitimation of power based on material
foundations it can itself be the foundation from which
material power flows. After reviewing some evidence of
the importance of ritual knowledge as property I link
its importance to Marshall Sahlins’s (2022) argument
that, until recently at least, most people lived in what he
has called an ‘enchanted universe’. In this context, power
differentials and social inequality can exist in societies
that lack the material distinctions usually associated
with them. In developing this proposal, I then return
to an argument I first made many years ago (Shennan
1996) about the importance of ritual knowledge and
cultural transmission in the creation of inequality in
hunter-gatherer societies, before reviewing more recent
work on this topic and concluding.