Hege Damlien: Technology as human social tradition. Cultural transmission among hunter-gatherers. Origins of Human Behavior and Culture 7

Technology as Human Social Tradition is a novel and welcome contribution to studies of human cultural diversity, a fundamental concern of a significant number of anthropologists and archaeologists. The main aim of Peter Jordan’s book is to outline a new approach to studying variability and transformation in human material culture, a task in which Jordan convincingly succeeds. Jordan argues that human material culture and technology is best understood as an expression of social tradition; that is, as cultural information reproduced through social learning. Drawing on the application of cultural transmission theory (or dual inheritance theory) to empirical research, Jordan develops a descent with modification perspective on the history of human cultural traditions with the aim of producing insight into three research themes pertaining to the evolution of technology: how multiple material culture traditions are propagated through social learning; the factors that promote coherent linages of tradition to form; and the extent of which these linages have historical congruence with each other and with language (p. 5). Ethnographic case studies of hunter-gatherer societies in northwest Siberia, the Pacific Northwest Coast and northern California form Jordan’s empirical foundation for reconstructing historically contingent patterns of technological continuity and change among hunter-gatherers across a comparative range of culture historical settings and social scales, and to explain, on a case to case basis, why particular patterns of cultural evolution have emerged (p. 77). Jordan’s book offers important cross-cultural insights into the evolution of material culture traditions on different social and spatial scales, comparative insight into how and why different kinds of material culture traditions evolve and change as well as the contextual factors that structure diversification and change in material culture linages. The book is divided into six chapters and one appendix which comprise results derived from the quantitative analysis. In chapter 1 Jordan introduces the research objective as well as his theoretical approach. Jordan argues that technological traditions exhibit heritable continuity (p. 2), they consist of information stored in human brains that is passed on to others through the unique sophistication of human high-fidelity social learning (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981). As such, technological traditions can be understood as material manifestation of a complex transmission system in which cultural information is inherited, produced and cumulatively transformed by the actions of individuals in their communities. He then follows by examining how cultural transmission theory (Boyd and Richerson 2005) can be used to provide a general framework for examining the reproduction of cultural traditions, and also how some of these specific processes of cultural propagation link directly into long-standing anthropological and archaeological debates about the social reproduction ofmaterial culture traditions. The main argument is that cultural transmission processes have some general analogies with the ways in which genetic information is inherited and cumulatively adjusted within and between populations; in short, cultural traditions can be argued to exhibit evolutionary properties of decent with modification (p. 4). Finally, Jordan examines some of the conceptual issues that arise from a dual inheritance perspective on culture. These are explored under three overreaching themes that systematically run through the book: how cultural information is reproduced through social learning (cultural propagation); to what extent cultural lineages form (cultural coherence); and, finally, the degree to which lineages develop independently or become ‘bundled’ together (cultural congruence). In chapter 2 Jordan presents the methodological framework constructed in order to empirically address the main themes of propagation, coherence and historical congruence in material culture traditions. First, Jordan draws upon key arguments in the anthropology of technology and the concept of chaîne opératoire to understand the internal logic and social embeddedness behind