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      Detecting Apprentices and Innovators in the Archaeological Record: The Shell Bead-Making Industry of the Channel Islands

      Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
      Springer Nature

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          The hidden structure of overimitation.

          Young children are surprisingly judicious imitators, but there are also times when their reproduction of others' actions appears strikingly illogical. For example, children who observe an adult inefficiently operating a novel object frequently engage in what we term overimitation, persistently reproducing the adult's unnecessary actions. Although children readily overimitate irrelevant actions that even chimpanzees ignore, this curious effect has previously attracted little interest; it has been assumed that children overimitate not for theoretically significant reasons, but rather as a purely social exercise. In this paper, however, we challenge this view, presenting evidence that overimitation reflects a more fundamental cognitive process. We show that children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating a novel object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful, implicitly revising their causal understanding of the object accordingly. This automatic causal encoding process allows children to rapidly calibrate their causal beliefs about even the most opaque physical systems, but it also carries a cost. When some of the adult's purposeful actions are unnecessary-even transparently so-children are highly prone to mis-encoding them as causally significant. The resulting distortions in children's causal beliefs are the true cause of overimitation, a fact that makes the effect remarkably resistant to extinction. Despite countervailing task demands, time pressure, and even direct warnings, children are frequently unable to avoid reproducing the adult's irrelevant actions because they have already incorporated them into their representation of the target object's causal structure.
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            Complex Hunter-Gatherer-Fishers of Prehistoric California: Chiefs, Specialists, and Maritime Adaptations of the Channel Islands

            The Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel region were among the most economically and politically complex hunter–gatherer cultures of the New World. In recent decades, rich ethnohistorical documents pertaining to Chumash culture were analyzed, thus providing an excellent foundation for understanding the simple chiefdom that was in place as explorers and missionaries arrived in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Current archaeological research on the Channel Islands focuses on the emergence of ranked society in Chumash prehistory, with special emphasis on political developments and environmental stresses that contributed to cultural evolution. A wide range of data acquired from the Channel Islands illuminates a new model of the rise of complexity. This model of chiefdom emergence is based on population-resource imbalances, political opportunism, and the manipulation of labor by rising elites. Diverse lines of evidence must be employed to evaluate the timing, causes, and consequences of increasing complexity. Los Chumash de la región del Canal de Santa Bárbara desarrollaron una de las culturas de cazadores-recolectores políticamente más complejas del Nuevo Mundo. En las últimas décadas se han analizado ricos documentos etnohistóricos pertenecientes a la cultura Chumash. Estos proporcionan una excelente base para entender la simple jefatura en que se encontraban organizados cuando exploradores y misioneros arribaron a la región entre los sighs XVI y XVIII. La investigación arqueológica actual en las Islas del Canal se concentra en el surgimiento de una sociedad de rangos en la prehistoria Chumash, con especial énfasis en los procesos políticos y tensiones ambientales que contribuyeron a la evolución cultural. Un amplio rango de datos provenientes de las Islas del Canal arrojan luz sobre un nuevo modelo del surgimiento de la complejidad. Este modelo del surgimiento de jefaturas se basa en desequilibrios entre población y recursos, oportunismo político y la manipulación de la fuerza de trabajo por parte de élites en ascenso. Diversos tipos de evidencia deben ser utilizados a fin de evaluar el ritmo, causas y consecuencias de la creciente complejidad
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              Social agency and the dynamics of prehistoric technology

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
                J Archaeol Method Theory
                Springer Nature
                1072-5369
                1573-7764
                June 2012
                May 2011
                : 19
                : 2
                : 269-305
                Article
                10.1007/s10816-011-9108-1
                25989e2e-bbbd-47f9-9e92-ce8f1cb957b3
                © 2012
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