Population, Culture History, and the Dynamics of Culture Change

If archaeology is to succeed in explaining culture change, it must view the archaeological record from the perspective of cultural “descent with modification,” in so doing returning to many of the issues addressed by the culture‐history agenda rejected 30–40 years ago. This involves a consideration of the processes affecting cultural transmission. Many of these are strongly affected by the history of the biological populations in which cultural transmission occurs. It can be shown that prehistoric populations fluctuated much more than used to be thought and that these fluctuations can be hard to detect archaeologically. They can often be associated with cultural changes, and, in fact, the size of populations affects the nature of cultural processes in a variety of ways. These general points are illustrated with reference to a case study from the circum‐Alpine Neolithic, where dendrochronology provides high‐resolution dating.