Biography

My main areas of research focus on the integration of evolutionary theory into archaeology. Some of the earlier work, undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s, involved creating a groundwork for that integration. This built on the earlier work of Bob Dunnell, Bob Leonard, and Tom Jones. No one thinks or works in a vacuum. In addition to Dunnell, Leonard, and Jones, I’ve benefited from collaborative interactions with Mike Schiffer, Stephen Shennan, Mark Collard, Tom Holland, Marcel Harmon, Todd VanPool, José Luis Lanata, Carl Lipo, and especially Lee Lyman, whose ideas on evolution and archaeology (not to mention the history of American archaeology) are so intertwined with my own that it’s impossible to state with any certainty exactly which one of us thought of what.

Lately I’ve concentrated on the use of phylogenetic methods, especially cladistics, in archaeology. This is extremely controversial, as is the application of evolutionary principles to cultural phenomena generally. The argument has been made that cultural evolution is anagenetic (in a straight line) rather than cladogenetic (branching). I do not support this notion. Another argument is that “biological” methods cannot resolve cultural phylogeny because culture involves horizontal as opposed to strictly vertical transmission. As a result, cultural phylogeny is too reticulate to be understood by using cladistics or any other phylogenetic method. Of course, this pessimistic view overlooks the fact that much of nature is reticulate—for example, the best guess is that 40% of angiosperm taxa are “hybrids.” But this hasn’t caused naturalists to throw up their hands in defeat. Rather, they work around the problems or take them apart bit by bit using a battery of clever methods and techniques. I’m trying to do the same thing. Three articles—one in Journal of Archaeological Research (2001), one in Evolutionary Anthropology (2002), and one in Journal of Theoretical Biology (2002)—summarize attempts in this direction, and the book Cladistics in Archaeology (2003) is a more in-depth treatment (see Publications).

On the personal side, I have three great kids—Nathan, Kimberly and Aaron, all of whom actually took anthropology in college—and two lazy cats, neither of whom took anthropology. All of us greatly miss Beverly, a wonderful wife and mother, who died in May 2005.