Populations of living things evolve over time, but do other things? Evolution involves transmission, be it of genes, ideas, or designs. What is transmitted, how and by whom, influences tempo and mode of evolution. In recent years, archeologists have applied evolutionary logic and processes to their study of things made and used by ancient people. Despite differences in subject units and in modes and patterns of transmission, evolutionary processes and the transmission modes that accompany them are worth seeking in archeological data. Stone spear points are abundant in the archeological record, yet we lack a theory to explain the creation, duration, and divergence of point types. Evolutionary studies of New World Late Pleistocene Paleoindian points are a step toward such theory, but limit the form of data and the evolutionary processes considered. An alternative in the study of Paleoindian points is geometric morphometric methods that do not constrain how point size and form are characterized nor assume branching divergence between taxa. Evolutionism should not dominate archeology, but it should become a major area of research within the field.
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