McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, United Kingdom.
Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
PLoS One. 2020 Feb 6;15(2):e0227579. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227579. eCollection 2020.
Questions about the evolution of material culture are widespread in the humanities and social sciences. Statistical modeling of long-term changes in material culture is less common due to a lack of appropriate frameworks. Our goal is to close this gap and provide robust statistical methods for examining changes in the diversity of material culture. We provide an open-source and quantitative workflow for estimating rates of origination, extinction, and preservation, as well as identifying key shift points in the diversification histories of material culture. We demonstrate our approach using two distinct kinds of data: age ranges for the production of American car models, and radiocarbon dates associated with archaeological cultures of the European Neolithic. Our approach improves on existing frameworks by disentangling the relative contributions of origination and extinction to diversification. Our method also permits rigorous statistical testing of competing hypotheses to explain changes in diversity. Finally, we stress the value of a flexible approach that can be applied to data in various forms; this flexibility allows scholars to explore commonalities between forms of material culture and ask questions about the general properties of cultural change.
物质文化的演变问题在人文学科和社会科学中广泛存在。由于缺乏适当的框架，对物质文化的长期变化进行统计建模的情况较少。我们的目标是缩小这一差距，并提供用于检查物质文化多样性变化的强大的统计方法。我们提供了一个开源和定量的工作流程，用于估计起源、灭绝和保存的速度，以及识别物质文化多样化历史中的关键转折点。我们使用两种不同类型的数据来演示我们的方法：美国汽车模型生产的年龄范围，以及与欧洲新石器时代考古文化相关的放射性碳日期。我们的方法通过分离起源和灭绝对多样化的相对贡献，改进了现有框架。我们的方法还允许对解释多样性变化的竞争假设进行严格的统计检验。最后，我们强调了灵活方法的价值，该方法可以应用于各种形式的数据；这种灵活性使学者能够探索物质文化形式之间的共同之处，并提出关于文化变化一般属性的问题。
