Introduction to this Special Issue on the Evolution of Material Culture

摘要

Scholars have been interested in the history of material culture for centuries, addressing change in artifacts from a wide variety of standpoints including art history, symbolism, and culture history. Artifacts, in these contexts, marked change in the lives of artists, practices and beliefs of the literary and artistic class, and cultural traditions of entire populations (Schlereth 1999). It has only been in recent decades that scholars have initiated rigorous studies of material cultural evolution using Darwinian evolutionary theory. Darwinian analysis of material culture has faced an uphill battle on several fronts. One critical factor was an explicit rejection of Darwinian thinking among prominent anthropologists of the early twentieth century (e.g. Kroeber 1931). Culture historians in the middle decades in the twentieth century generally relied upon a paradigm designed to provide descriptive accounts of artifact inventories as normative markers of particularistic cultural traditions, but generally did not seek any deeper evolutionary explanations of variability.