Stephen Shennan | University College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Stephen Shennan

Research paper thumbnail of Population, culture history, and the dynamics of change in European prehistory

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024

Despite many attacks on its shortcomings, culture history has remained in practice the dominant f... more Despite many attacks on its shortcomings, culture history has remained in practice the dominant framework for describing and interpreting European prehistory. It has gained even more salience in recent years because the new information coming from ancient DNA about the genetic ancestry of individuals in prehistory seems to show that this correlates closely with the cultural affiliation of the archaeological material with which they are found, raising concerns that old and discredited links between biological and cultural identity are being revived. This article argues that exploring the links between cultural and genetic ancestry does not need to fall into these errors if it takes its theory and methods from the discipline of cultural evolution and rejects characterization of the relationship in terms of 'ethnic groups'. This involves describing the archaeological record in more fine-grained, less essentialist ways and at the same time linking the archaeological and genetic patterns to histories of the rise and decline of populations and the interactions between them.

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Research paper thumbnail of LINEAGES OF CULTURAL TRANSMiSSiON

Ellen, R.E., Lycett, S.J., Johns, S.E. (Eds.) Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology, 2013

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Research paper thumbnail of The Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe. EUROEVOL Dataset 1: Sites, Phases and Radiocarbon data. Journal of Open Archaeology Data

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Research paper thumbnail of Handbook of Archaeological Theories

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the... more This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An extensive bibliography is included. This volume is the single most important reference for current information on contemporary archaeological theories.

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Research paper thumbnail of Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production

The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2018

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Research paper thumbnail of Supply and Demand in the Neolithic Quarry Production of Northwest Europe

The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2017

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Research paper thumbnail of Beyond hypothesis-testing

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Research paper thumbnail of Simulating Geographical Variation in Material Culture: Were Early Modern Humans in Europe Ethnically Structured?

Springer eBooks, 2015

A high degree of structuring is seen in the spatial distribution of symbolic artefact types assoc... more A high degree of structuring is seen in the spatial distribution of symbolic artefact types associated with the Aurignacian culture in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, particularly the degree of sharing of ornament types across archaeological sites. Multivariate analyses of these distributions have been interpreted as indicating ethno-linguistic differentiation (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006), although simpler explanations such as isolation-by-distance have not been formally discounted. In this study we have developed a spatiotemporally explicit cultural transmission simulation model that generates expectations of a range of spatial statistics describing the distribution of shared ornament types. We compare these simulated spatial statistics to those observed from archaeological data for Aurignacian Europe—using Approximate Bayesian Computation—in order to test and compare a range of hypotheses concerning group interaction dynamics for the period. Among the set of hypotheses examined, we include ones where material culture does or does not drive group interaction dynamics.

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Research paper thumbnail of Food Income and the Evolution of Forager Mobility

Scientific Reports, Apr 1, 2019

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Research paper thumbnail of Patterns, Processes, and Parsimony

University of Arizona Press eBooks, Jul 12, 2022

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Research paper thumbnail of The evolution of farming, and the boom and bust of culture

The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2015

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Research paper thumbnail of Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe

Nature

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Research paper thumbnail of A Neolithic population model based on new radiocarbon dates from mining, funerary and population scaled activity in the Saint-Gond Marshes region of North East France

Quaternary International

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Research paper thumbnail of The NERD Dataset: Near East Radiocarbon Dates between 15,000 and 1,500 cal. yr. BP

Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 2022

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository ... more To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates for the whole Near East from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (15,000-1,500 cal. yr. BP). It is composed of 11,027 radiocarbon dates from 1,023 sites that have been collected comprehensively by cross-checking multiple sources (extant digital archives and databases, edited volumes, monographs, journals papers, archaeological excavation reports, etc.) under the umbrella of the Leverhulme Trust funded project "Changing the Face of the Mediterranean" and of the ERC project "CLASS-Climate, Landscape, Settlement and Society: Exploring Human-Environment Interaction in the Ancient Near East". This is an ongoing dataset that will be updated step by step with newly published radiocarbon dates.

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Research paper thumbnail of Long-Term Demographic Trends in Prehistoric Italy: Climate Impacts and Regionalised Socio-Ecological Trajectories

Journal of World Prehistory, 2021

The Italian peninsula offers an excellent case study within which to investigate long-term region... more The Italian peninsula offers an excellent case study within which to investigate long-term regional demographic trends and their response to climate fluctuations, especially given its diverse landscapes, latitudinal range and varied elevations. In the past two decades, summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates have become an important method for inferring population dynamics in prehistory. Recent advances in this approach also allow for statistical assessment of spatio-temporal patterning in demographic trends. In this paper we reconstruct population change for the whole Italian peninsula from the Late Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age (10,000–2800 cal yr BP). How did population patterns vary across time and space? Were fluctuations in human population related to climate change? In order to answer these questions, we have collated a large list of published radiocarbon dates (n = 4010) and use this list firstly to infer the demographic trends for the Italian pen...

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Research paper thumbnail of Mediterranean landscape change during the Holocene: Synthesis, comparison and regional trends in population, land cover and climate

The Holocene, 2019

This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean region... more This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean regions, from Iberia and Morocco to the Levant, have been transformed by human and natural agencies during the past 10 millennia. It draws on a range of data sources: notably (1) archaeological site surveys ( n = 32,000) and14C dates ( n = 12,000) as proxies for long-term population change, (2) pollen records as a proxy for past vegetation and land cover ( n = 253) and (3) proxies, such as stable isotopes, from lake, cave and marine records as indicators of hydro-climate ( n = 47). Where possible, these data sets have been made spatially and temporally congruent in order to examine relationships between them statistically and graphically. Data have been aggregated or averaged for each region/sub-region and put into 200-year time windows. Archaeo-demographic data show a clear increase at the start of Neolithic farming, followed by a series of regionally asynchronous fluctuations in population, ...

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Research paper thumbnail of Prehistoric palaeodemographics and regional land cover change in eastern Iberia

The Holocene, 2019

Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. Whil... more Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. While climate plays a key role in determining the species pools within different regions and exerts a strong influence on broad vegetation patterning, the role of humans, particularly during prehistory, is less clear. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of prehistoric population change on shaping vegetation patterns in eastern Iberia and the Balearic Islands between the start of the Neolithic and the late Bronze Age. In all, 3385 radiocarbon dates have been compiled across the study area to provide a palaeodemographic proxy (radiocarbon summed probability distributions (SPDs)). Modelled trends in palaeodemographics are compared with regional-scale vegetation patterns deduced from analysis of 30 fossil pollen sequences. The pollen sequences have been standardised with count data aggregated into contiguous 200-year time windows from 11,000 cal. yr BP to the present. Samples have b...

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Research paper thumbnail of The changing face of the Mediterranean – Land cover, demography and environmental change: Introduction and overview

The Holocene, 2019

This paper introduces a special issue on The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demo... more This paper introduces a special issue on The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demography, and Environmental Change, which brings together up-to-date regional or thematic perspectives on major long-term trends in Mediterranean human–environment relations. Particularly, important insights are provided by palynology to reconstruct past vegetation and land cover, and archaeology to establish long-term demographic trends, but with further significant input from palaeoclimatology, palaeofire research and geomorphology. Here, we introduce the rationale behind this pan-Mediterranean research initiative, outline its major sources of evidence and method, and describe how individual submissions work to complement one another.

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Research paper thumbnail of Neolithic population crash in northwest Europe associated with agricultural crisis

Quaternary Research, 2019

The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population ... more The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture. However, the subsequent population decline has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One possible explanation is the reduction in yields in Neolithic cereal-based agriculture due to worsening climatic conditions. The suggestion of a correlation between Neolithic climate deterioration, agricultural productivity, and a decrease in population requires testing for northwestern Europe. Data for our analyses were collected during the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project. We assess the correlation between agricultural productivity and population densities in the Neolithic of northwest Europe by examining the changing frequencies of crop a...

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Research paper thumbnail of Spatial and Chronological Patterns in the Neolithisation of Europe

The Spatial and Chronological Patterns in the Neolithisation of Europe project is a spatial datab... more The Spatial and Chronological Patterns in the Neolithisation of Europe project is a spatial database of radiocarbon dates for the later Mesolithic and early Neolithic of Europe. There is also information concerning the contexts of the dates, the material dated and economic and cultural associations. This database may be searched on-line at the Archaeology Data Service

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Research paper thumbnail of Population, culture history, and the dynamics of change in European prehistory

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024

Despite many attacks on its shortcomings, culture history has remained in practice the dominant f... more Despite many attacks on its shortcomings, culture history has remained in practice the dominant framework for describing and interpreting European prehistory. It has gained even more salience in recent years because the new information coming from ancient DNA about the genetic ancestry of individuals in prehistory seems to show that this correlates closely with the cultural affiliation of the archaeological material with which they are found, raising concerns that old and discredited links between biological and cultural identity are being revived. This article argues that exploring the links between cultural and genetic ancestry does not need to fall into these errors if it takes its theory and methods from the discipline of cultural evolution and rejects characterization of the relationship in terms of 'ethnic groups'. This involves describing the archaeological record in more fine-grained, less essentialist ways and at the same time linking the archaeological and genetic patterns to histories of the rise and decline of populations and the interactions between them.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of LINEAGES OF CULTURAL TRANSMiSSiON

Ellen, R.E., Lycett, S.J., Johns, S.E. (Eds.) Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology, 2013

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe. EUROEVOL Dataset 1: Sites, Phases and Radiocarbon data. Journal of Open Archaeology Data

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Handbook of Archaeological Theories

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the... more This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An extensive bibliography is included. This volume is the single most important reference for current information on contemporary archaeological theories.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Explaining Variation in the Scale of Neolithic Quarry and Mine Production

The 82nd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2018

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Supply and Demand in the Neolithic Quarry Production of Northwest Europe

The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2017

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond hypothesis-testing

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Simulating Geographical Variation in Material Culture: Were Early Modern Humans in Europe Ethnically Structured?

Springer eBooks, 2015

A high degree of structuring is seen in the spatial distribution of symbolic artefact types assoc... more A high degree of structuring is seen in the spatial distribution of symbolic artefact types associated with the Aurignacian culture in Upper Palaeolithic Europe, particularly the degree of sharing of ornament types across archaeological sites. Multivariate analyses of these distributions have been interpreted as indicating ethno-linguistic differentiation (Vanhaeren and d’Errico 2006), although simpler explanations such as isolation-by-distance have not been formally discounted. In this study we have developed a spatiotemporally explicit cultural transmission simulation model that generates expectations of a range of spatial statistics describing the distribution of shared ornament types. We compare these simulated spatial statistics to those observed from archaeological data for Aurignacian Europe—using Approximate Bayesian Computation—in order to test and compare a range of hypotheses concerning group interaction dynamics for the period. Among the set of hypotheses examined, we include ones where material culture does or does not drive group interaction dynamics.

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Research paper thumbnail of Food Income and the Evolution of Forager Mobility

Scientific Reports, Apr 1, 2019

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Research paper thumbnail of Patterns, Processes, and Parsimony

University of Arizona Press eBooks, Jul 12, 2022

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Research paper thumbnail of The evolution of farming, and the boom and bust of culture

The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2015

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe

Nature

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Research paper thumbnail of A Neolithic population model based on new radiocarbon dates from mining, funerary and population scaled activity in the Saint-Gond Marshes region of North East France

Quaternary International

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of The NERD Dataset: Near East Radiocarbon Dates between 15,000 and 1,500 cal. yr. BP

Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 2022

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository ... more To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates for the whole Near East from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (15,000-1,500 cal. yr. BP). It is composed of 11,027 radiocarbon dates from 1,023 sites that have been collected comprehensively by cross-checking multiple sources (extant digital archives and databases, edited volumes, monographs, journals papers, archaeological excavation reports, etc.) under the umbrella of the Leverhulme Trust funded project "Changing the Face of the Mediterranean" and of the ERC project "CLASS-Climate, Landscape, Settlement and Society: Exploring Human-Environment Interaction in the Ancient Near East". This is an ongoing dataset that will be updated step by step with newly published radiocarbon dates.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Long-Term Demographic Trends in Prehistoric Italy: Climate Impacts and Regionalised Socio-Ecological Trajectories

Journal of World Prehistory, 2021

The Italian peninsula offers an excellent case study within which to investigate long-term region... more The Italian peninsula offers an excellent case study within which to investigate long-term regional demographic trends and their response to climate fluctuations, especially given its diverse landscapes, latitudinal range and varied elevations. In the past two decades, summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates have become an important method for inferring population dynamics in prehistory. Recent advances in this approach also allow for statistical assessment of spatio-temporal patterning in demographic trends. In this paper we reconstruct population change for the whole Italian peninsula from the Late Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age (10,000–2800 cal yr BP). How did population patterns vary across time and space? Were fluctuations in human population related to climate change? In order to answer these questions, we have collated a large list of published radiocarbon dates (n = 4010) and use this list firstly to infer the demographic trends for the Italian pen...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Mediterranean landscape change during the Holocene: Synthesis, comparison and regional trends in population, land cover and climate

The Holocene, 2019

This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean region... more This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean regions, from Iberia and Morocco to the Levant, have been transformed by human and natural agencies during the past 10 millennia. It draws on a range of data sources: notably (1) archaeological site surveys ( n = 32,000) and14C dates ( n = 12,000) as proxies for long-term population change, (2) pollen records as a proxy for past vegetation and land cover ( n = 253) and (3) proxies, such as stable isotopes, from lake, cave and marine records as indicators of hydro-climate ( n = 47). Where possible, these data sets have been made spatially and temporally congruent in order to examine relationships between them statistically and graphically. Data have been aggregated or averaged for each region/sub-region and put into 200-year time windows. Archaeo-demographic data show a clear increase at the start of Neolithic farming, followed by a series of regionally asynchronous fluctuations in population, ...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Prehistoric palaeodemographics and regional land cover change in eastern Iberia

The Holocene, 2019

Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. Whil... more Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. While climate plays a key role in determining the species pools within different regions and exerts a strong influence on broad vegetation patterning, the role of humans, particularly during prehistory, is less clear. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of prehistoric population change on shaping vegetation patterns in eastern Iberia and the Balearic Islands between the start of the Neolithic and the late Bronze Age. In all, 3385 radiocarbon dates have been compiled across the study area to provide a palaeodemographic proxy (radiocarbon summed probability distributions (SPDs)). Modelled trends in palaeodemographics are compared with regional-scale vegetation patterns deduced from analysis of 30 fossil pollen sequences. The pollen sequences have been standardised with count data aggregated into contiguous 200-year time windows from 11,000 cal. yr BP to the present. Samples have b...

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Research paper thumbnail of The changing face of the Mediterranean – Land cover, demography and environmental change: Introduction and overview

The Holocene, 2019

This paper introduces a special issue on The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demo... more This paper introduces a special issue on The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demography, and Environmental Change, which brings together up-to-date regional or thematic perspectives on major long-term trends in Mediterranean human–environment relations. Particularly, important insights are provided by palynology to reconstruct past vegetation and land cover, and archaeology to establish long-term demographic trends, but with further significant input from palaeoclimatology, palaeofire research and geomorphology. Here, we introduce the rationale behind this pan-Mediterranean research initiative, outline its major sources of evidence and method, and describe how individual submissions work to complement one another.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Neolithic population crash in northwest Europe associated with agricultural crisis

Quaternary Research, 2019

The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population ... more The focus of this paper is the Neolithic of northwest Europe, where a rapid growth in population between ~5950 and ~5550 cal yr BP is followed by a decline that lasted until ~4950 cal yr BP. The timing of the increase in population density correlates with the local appearance of farming and is attributed to the advantageous effects of agriculture. However, the subsequent population decline has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One possible explanation is the reduction in yields in Neolithic cereal-based agriculture due to worsening climatic conditions. The suggestion of a correlation between Neolithic climate deterioration, agricultural productivity, and a decrease in population requires testing for northwestern Europe. Data for our analyses were collected during the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe project. We assess the correlation between agricultural productivity and population densities in the Neolithic of northwest Europe by examining the changing frequencies of crop a...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Spatial and Chronological Patterns in the Neolithisation of Europe

The Spatial and Chronological Patterns in the Neolithisation of Europe project is a spatial datab... more The Spatial and Chronological Patterns in the Neolithisation of Europe project is a spatial database of radiocarbon dates for the later Mesolithic and early Neolithic of Europe. There is also information concerning the contexts of the dates, the material dated and economic and cultural associations. This database may be searched on-line at the Archaeology Data Service

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Research paper thumbnail of Random drift and culture change

We show that the frequency distributions of cultural variants, in three different real-world exam... more We show that the frequency distributions of cultural variants, in three different real-world examples—first names, archaeological pottery and applications for technology patents—follow power laws that can be explained by a simple model of random drift. We conclude that cultural and economic choices often reflect a decision process that is value-neutral; this result has far-reaching testable implications for social-science research.

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