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

[502293]布坎南国际研究奖学金计划使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行三到二十四个月的研究。该计划的奖励为联合研究提供了机会，并利用独特或互补的设施、专业知识和国外的实验条件。该奖项将支持Briggs Buchanan博士与Mark Collard博士在加拿大温哥华的不列颠哥伦比亚大学进行为期22个月的研究。近年来，被称为分类学的进化生物学技术已开始被用于评估人类学和历史语言学问题。这种方法解决史前长期存在的问题的潜力是相当大的。在考古学中，使用分类学有希望描绘文化谱系，这是该学科的主要目标之一。然而，在分类学被考古学家广泛使用之前，迫切需要对这种方法进行批判性评估。拟议的研究将评估方法选择对分类学考古应用结果的影响。本文将探讨六个关键问题：1)分类单元构建，2)字符选择，3)字符编码，4)大小校正，5)字符独立性，以及6)外群选择。科拉德博士在类人猿化石和非人灵长类动物系统发育关系的重建以及对物质文化中民族志和考古记录模式的调查方面广泛从事分支学研究。定义和追踪史前文化谱系的能力将对考古学产生重大影响，特别是在文化迁移、传播或变化难以从记录中辨别的情况下。在记录和理解文化传播如何在狩猎采集社会中发挥作用方面，分类学可能被证明是无价的，它也应该为在其他地方研究此类问题的人类学家提供一个重要的工具。

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.