Peter David Jordan - Technology as human social tradition : cultural transmission among hunter-gatherers

The research presented in this book has taken shape slowly, over a number of years. The work spans academic appointments in London, Sheffield, Aberdeen, and Groningen, as well as sabbaticals in Oslo and in Kyoto, and ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Northwest Siberia. All this means that I have many friends, academic colleagues, and local communities to thank for all their encouragement, advice, practical assistance, hospitality, and general support along the way.

It all started with a postdoctoral research fellowship at the new Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behavior (CEACB), Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL), which was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and directed by Stephen Shennan. This period at UCL provided an enormously stimulating and yet also highly supportive intellectual environment in which to start exploring the general theme of cultural transmission, particularly in relation to Californian hunter-gatherer ethnography and the Western North America Databases.

I am very grateful for having had the chance to exchange ideas and establish contacts with many UCL staff, especially Andy Bevan, Mark Collard, James Connolly, Fiona Jordan, Stephen Shennan, James Steele, and Jamie Tehrani. Further funding from the AHRC led to the CEACB becoming the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (CECD). This was a more extended research network led by James Steele, and it provided further context, direction, and practical support for the research that has eventually become this book.

The Siberian chapter draws on materials collected during a two-year Leverhulme Trust Special Research Fellowship (SRF/2002/0218), which was hosted at UCL and later at the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield. I am grateful to Peter Ucko, John Barrett, and the UK Leverhulme Trust for supporting this fellowship. In Siberia, I thank N. V Lukina, Konstantin Karacharov, and Andrei Filtchenko for their input, and I am also deeply grateful to all the Eastern Khanty communities I visited during ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, especially the families at Achimovy 1 and Achimovy 2, and also V. S. Kogonchin and Aleks Riskin for their logistical support in the remote field settings.

Many of the deeper insights into the importance of kinship and social institutions, and the contrasting ways in which they structure cultural inheritance, started to emerge only after sustained immersion in the Californian, Pacific Northwest Coast, and Siberian ethnography during a wonderful year spent at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) in Olso; these understandings functioned as comparative insights in the collaborative project on Early Networking in Northern Fennoscandia, led by Charlotte Damm.

Over the years that this book has taken shape, I recall fondly many insightful conversations with Marek Zvelebil (19522011) about the general theme of intergenerational cultural inheritance and its deeper relevance to the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers. I am also thankful to Sean ONeill, CECD PhD candidate, for pointing out many novel features of Northwest Coast architecture, such as the modular design of the Coast Salish longhouses. The research was also presented in various conferences, symposia, and lectures, and the core ideas and conclusions were enriched, clarified, and strengthened thanks to many comments and questions received along the way. Specific conversations with Bob Bettinger, Olivier Gosselain, Brian Hayden, and Mike OBrien all helped crystalize important ideas and questions during this period. Im also grateful to Junzo Uchiyama for arranging stimulating research visits to the Research Institute of Humanity and Nature (RIHN) in Kyoto, where further progress was made.

As ideas for a more extended comparative analysis of hunter-gatherers, technology, and cultural transmission started to take clearer shape, Joe Henrich and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder encouraged me to publish this book in their new series with the University of California Press. For that I am grateful. Blake Edgar has provided encouragement and support throughout the extended writing process, as well as timely reminders as the original (and rather optimistic!) writing schedule started to lapse.