Customer Reviews

Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution

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Shennan lays the groundwork for an archaeology beyond bones and tools and tells us where it can lead. He specifically addresses both the ability of archaeology to develop theories and its limitations when supporting them.
Of particular interest are his chapters of interpretation, which build on his rather dry theorectical framework. These include a fascinating description of the origin of agriculture and the role of women in early societies.
I found much of the book to be a hard read. Shennan's writing style is often long-winded and full of self-referential vocabulary used in a very precise way. One can perhaps forgive his style as the need to satisfy potential critics in his own academic community. Still, I have a strong preference for clear writing and Shennan does not always offer that.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to acquire a solid high-level understanding of the state of archaeological interpretation or the limits of the science, but be ready to find a quite room and a good reading lamp.

I remember this as an interesting application of evolutionary psychology and memetic theory to archeology, written by an archaeologist. The writing style isn't very engaging though - it's a very slow slog at times.

Shennan does, however, have one of the best approaches to the debate about memetic theory:

"It seems that we still do not understand the psychological mechanisms involved in cultural inheritance, which remain the object of ongoing debate and investigation. However, rather than worry too much about this and assume that we cannot make any progress until the mechanism is fully understood, the way forward for archaeologists and anthropologists, if not for psychologists, seems to be to ignore the psychological mechanisms and accept that, whatever they may be, they lead to culture having the characteristics of an inheritance system with adaptive consequences. Even if the meme concept in the strict sense is problematical, the word meme has been such a successful meme itself that it represents a useful shorthand way of referring to the idea that culture is an evolutionary system involving inheritance. Archeology is particularly interested in those cases where the information passed on concerns ways of making and using artifacts. ... We can ask what are the population level processes characteristic of this inheritance system. This is what biologists did before they understood genetics. They could still measure the heritability of particular traits from one generation to the next without knowing the mechanisms involved. Indeed, it is well known that Darwin came up with his theory of natural selection while holding a completely erroneous view about how genetic transmission worked. "