IRFP: Cultural Transmission and Phylogenetic Inference in Material Culture

IRFP：物质文化中的文化传播和系统发育推断

• 批准号: 1064534
• 负责人: Jonathan Scholnick
• 金额: $ 13.35万
• 依托单位: Scholnick Jonathan B
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Fellowship Award
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-01-01 至 2014-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1064534&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IRFP; Cultural; Transmission; Phylogenetic; Inference

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine 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-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Jonathan Scholnick to work with Dr. Mark Collard at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.This project investigates the evolution of cultural traditions in the workshops that produced historical New England gravestones. Many of these artifacts, still standing in burial grounds, are associated with individual carvers through the archival record. The lineages of these gravestone carvers and their workshop affiliations are compared with the decorative techniques to trace the transmission of culture. This study adds to our understanding of the emergence of material culture traditions through social learning of individual craft producers, particularly linking cultural transmission between individuals to population-level cultural traditions. This project will also refine our understanding of material culture diversity of the time-averaged assemblages that archaeologists commonly study.Recently, biological methods of inferring family trees from an organism's genetic or phenotypic traits have been applied to culture, particularly artifacts and language. Like biology, the aim is to learn about the historic events that account population level cultural diversity, including natural selection, and migration. Since the transmission of cultural behaviors in some ways resembles the way that genes are passed from parent to child, a suite of cultural transmission models have been adapted from population genetics. Culture, however, can be acquired via more diverse and complicated set of pathways. These departures present a challenge to anthropology and other fields that are actively using these cultural evolutionary principles.

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9到24个月的研究。该计划的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，并利用国外独特或互补的设施、专业知识和实验条件。该奖项将支持乔纳森·肖尔尼克博士与不列颠哥伦比亚省本纳比西蒙·弗雷泽大学的马克·科拉德博士合作的为期24个月的研究奖学金。该项目调查在生产历史新英格兰墓碑的车间中文化传统的演变。其中许多文物仍然矗立在墓地里，通过档案记录与个别雕刻者联系在一起。这些墓碑雕刻者的血统和他们的作坊从属关系与装饰技术进行了比较，以追溯文化的传播。这项研究通过对个别手工艺品生产者的社会学习，特别是将个人之间的文化传播与人口层面的文化传统联系起来，加深了我们对物质文化传统产生的理解。这个项目还将加深我们对考古学家通常研究的平均时间组合的物质文化多样性的理解。最近，根据生物的遗传或表型特征推断家谱的生物学方法已被应用于文化，特别是人工制品和语言。与生物学一样，这门课程的目的是了解说明人口水平文化多样性的历史事件，包括自然选择和迁徙。由于文化行为的传播在某些方面类似于基因从父母传给孩子的方式，一套文化传播模式已经从群体遗传学中得到了改编。然而，文化可以通过一套更多样、更复杂的途径获得。这些偏离对人类学和其他积极使用这些文化进化原则的领域构成了挑战。