From culture difference to a measure of ethnogenesis. The limits of archaeological inquiry.

BARCELÓ, JOAN ANTON; DEL CASTILLO, FLORENCIA; MAMELI, LAURA; MIGUEL, FRANCESC; VILA, XAVIER

Integrating qualitative and social science factors in archaeological modelling

Springer

Lugar: Suiza; Año: 2019; p. 38 - 73

The existence of cultural differences and similarities between populations haslong been a major topic of investigation for social scientists. In the last 40 years,the very idea of ethnicity has evolved from a static and essentialist classification of human groups according to their immutable ?nature? to a relational frame of reference used by groups of people to consider themselves ?similar? or to be explicitly differentiated by others. Nevertheless, the growing importance of variability analysis of mitochondrial DNA and other biological markers in modern anthropological studies, with their emphasis on the identification of geographic patterns in genetic and phenotypic diversity of prehistoric populations is going in the opposite direction. In this paper we present a preliminary model and its computer implementation to convert qualitative cultural distinctions into a measure of ethnogenesis and social fractionalization. We explore new ways of transforming input information in form of the presence/absence of distinctive cultural features into a metric space of social identity. Artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to build a multidimensional space of social identity are taken into account. An agent-based computer simulation is also presented, showing how social fractionalization, social polarity and conflict can emerge from the dynamical nature of cultural differences and similarities. Our model suggests that the more inter-generational knowledge transmission among socially aggregated individuals in the past, the greater the similarity in the social activity performed by agents in the present, and the same for their territoriality and the way frontiers and social networks can be negotiated.