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

0502293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3至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。该奖项将支持布里格斯·布坎南博士与加拿大温哥华不列颠哥伦比亚大学马克·科拉德博士合作的为期22个月的研究奖学金。近年来，被称为分支生物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。这种方法有相当大的潜力来解决史前长期存在的问题。在考古学中，分支学的使用有望描绘出文化谱系，这是该学科的主要目标之一。然而，在分支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支学考古应用结果的影响。将研究六个关键问题：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，6)外群选择。科拉德博士在重建人类化石和非人类灵长类动物的系统发育关系，以及研究物质文化中的人种学和考古学记录的模式方面，与分支学有着广泛的合作。确定和追踪史前文化谱系的能力将对考古学产生重大影响，特别是在记录中难以辨别文化迁移、传播或变化的情况下。分支学可能被证明对记录和理解狩猎采集社会中的文化传播功能是非常有价值的，它也应该为人类学家在其他地方研究这类问题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.