International Research Fellowship Program: Impact of Methodological Choices on Assessments of the Reliability of Archaeological Phylogenetic Hypotheses

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0502293BuchananThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-two-month research fellowship by Dr. Briggs Buchanan to work with Dr. Mark Collard at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.In recent years, the evolutionary biological technique known as cladistics has begun to be employed in the assessment of anthropological and historical linguistic problems. The potential for this method to resolve long-standing problems in prehistory is considerable. In archaeology, the use of cladistics holds promise for delineating cultural lineages, which is one of the discipline's primary goals. Before cladistics becomes widely used by archaeologists, however, there is a pressing need for critical evaluation of this method. The proposed research will assess the impact that methodological choices have on the results of archaeological applications of cladistics. Six key issues will be examined: 1) taxon construction, 2) character selection, 3) character coding, 4) size correction, 5) character independence, and 6) outgroup selection. Dr. Collard has worked extensively with cladistics in the reconstruction of fossil hominid and non-human primate phylogenetic relationships and in the investigation of ethnographically and archaeologically documented patterns in material culture. The ability to define and trace cultural lineages in prehistory will have a significant impact upon archaeology, particularly in cases where cultural migration, diffusion, or change are difficult to discern in the record. Cladistics may prove to be invaluable toward documenting and understanding how cultural transmission functions in hunter-gatherer societies, it should also provide an important tool for anthropologists working elsewhere with such problems.