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Toy Story: Homophily, Transmission and the Use of Simple Simulation Models for Assessing Variability in the Archaeological Record

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Authors

Drost, CJ 

Abstract

The interpretation of spatial and temporal patterns in the archaeological record remains a long-standing issue in the discipline. Amongst many methods and interpretations, modelling of “biased transmission” has proved a successful strategy to tackle this problem. Here, we investigate a type of biased transmission, homophily, that is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. In contrast to other social sciences, homophily remains underused in archaeology. In order to fill this gap, we develop six distinct variants of a well-established modeling framework borrowed from social science, Axelrod's Cultural Dissemination Model. These so-called “toy models” are abstract models used for theory-building and aim at exploring the interplay between homophily and various factors (e.g. addition of spatial features such as mountains and coastlines, diffusion of innovations and population spread). The relevance and implications of each “toy model” for archaeological reasoning are then discussed.

Description

Keywords

Modelling, Homophily, Cultural transmission, Variability, Axelrod's cultural dissemination model, Spatially explicit simulation

Journal Title

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1072-5369
1573-7764

Volume Title

25

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC