W22: Theoretical and Methodological Issues In Evolutionary Archaeology: Toward an Unified Darwinian Paradigm.

XVth Congress of International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences Lisbon, Portugal,

 4th to 9th of September 2006.

                                   MORE INFORMATION: CLICK HERE

Hernán Juan Muscio and  Gabriel Eduardo José López

Grupo de Investigación Cultura, Comportamiento y Evolución Humana (GICCEH)

Sección Arqueología, Universidad de Buenos Aires. CONICET

25 de Mayo 217 3º Piso, Buenos Aires, (1002) ARG

w22_archaeoevolu@yahoo.com.ar

Asserting that artifacts and behaviors are part of the human phenotypes Evolutionary Archaeology explains the archaeological record in terms of the Darwinian theory of evolution. Sharing this common ground a great diversity of scopes has arisen, mainly from the  approaches of the Human Behavioural Ecology, Sociobiology, and Cultural Transmission Theory.  All these selectionist lines of reasoning expand the explanatory domain of the evolutionary research in a variety of topics, including social, technological, and biological evolution. However, a complete unified paradigm in Evolutionary Archaeology has not emerged. This demands the discussion of diverse epistemological, theoretical and methodological issues. At the core of the debate come out questions such as the units of selection, the role of the cultural transmission, the construction of cultural lineages, the documentation of neutral variation, the linkages between adaptive ecological behaviour and the broad time scale processes from which emerge archaeological patterns, between others. This workshop will bring together researchers working in a wide range of time periods and geographic areas, in order to generate a rich discussion ambience regarding the theoretical and methodological issues that could lead to an unified Evolutionary Archaeology paradigm.