A01=Peter David Jordan
anthropology
archaeology
Author_Peter David Jordan
Category=JHBA
Category=JHMC
cultural diversity
cultural lineages
cultural transmission theory
cumulative change
descent with modification
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
global history
human cultural material
human technology
hunter gatherers
indigenous societies
language history
material culture
northern california
northern hemisphere
northwest siberia
operational sequence
pacific northwest coast
social
social learning
social traditions
technology
tradition
variability
Product details
- ISBN 9780520276925
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Nov 2014
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Technology as Human Social Tradition outlines a novel approach to studying variability and cumulative change in human technology prominent research themes in both archaeology and anthropology. Peter Jordan argues that human material culture is best understood as an expression of social tradition. In this approach, each artifact stands as an output of a distinctive operational sequence with specific choices made at each stage in its production. Jordan also explores different material culture traditions that are propagated through social learning, factors that promote coherent lineages of tradition to form, and the extent to which these cultural lineages exhibit congruence with one another and with language history. Drawing on the application of cultural transmission theory to empirical research, Jordan develops a descent-with-modification perspective on the technology of Northern Hemisphere hunter-gatherers. Case studies from indigenous societies in Northwest Siberia, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and Northern California provide cross-cultural insights related to the evolution of material culture traditions at different social and spatial scales.
This book promises new ways of exploring some of the primary factors that generate human cultural diversity in the deep past and through to the present.
Peter Jordan is Director of the Arctic Centre at the University of Groningen and author of Material Culture and Sacred Landscape (2003), editor of Landscape and Culture in Northern Eurasia (2011), and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers (2014) and Ceramics before Farming (2009). Jordan is also series coeditor for Archaeology of the North with Cambridge University Press.
