Award Abstract #0502293
International Research Fellowship Program: Impact of Methodological Choices on Assessments of the Reliability of Archaeological Phylogenetic Hypotheses

NSF Org:	OISE Office of International Science and Engineering
Initial Amendment Date:	June 23, 2005
Latest Amendment Date:	August 16, 2007
Award Number:	0502293
Award Instrument:	Fellowship
Program Manager:	Susan Parris OISE Office of International Science and Engineering O/D OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR
Start Date:	September 1, 2005
Expires:	February 29, 2008 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$95809
Investigator(s):	Briggs Buchanan briggs@unm.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	Buchanan Briggs W Vancouver, / -
NSF Program(s):	EAPSI
Field Application(s):	0000099 Other Applications NEC
Program Reference Code(s):	OTHR, 7561, 5977, 5956, 0000
Program Element Code(s):	7316

ABSTRACT

0502293

Buchanan

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.

This award will support a twenty-two-month research fellowship by Dr. Briggs Buchanan to work with Dr. Mark Collard at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

In recent years, the evolutionary biological technique known as cladistics has begun to be employed in the assessment of anthropological and historical linguistic problems. The potential for this method to resolve long-standing problems in prehistory is considerable. In archaeology, the use of cladistics holds promise for delineating cultural lineages, which is one of the discipline's primary goals. Before cladistics becomes widely used by archaeologists, however, there is a pressing need for critical evaluation of this method. The proposed research will assess the impact that methodological choices have on the results of archaeological applications of cladistics. Six key issues will be examined: 1) taxon construction, 2) character selection, 3) character coding, 4) size correction, 5) character independence, and 6) outgroup selection.

Dr. Collard has worked extensively with cladistics in the reconstruction of fossil hominid and non-human primate phylogenetic relationships and in the investigation of ethnographically and archaeologically documented patterns in material culture. The ability to define and trace cultural lineages in prehistory will have a significant impact upon archaeology, particularly in cases where cultural migration, diffusion, or change are difficult to discern in the record. Cladistics may prove to be invaluable toward documenting and

understanding how cultural transmission functions in hunter-gatherer societies, it should also provide an important tool for anthropologists working elsewhere with such problems.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Buchanan, Briggs; Collard, Mark.  "Phenetics, Cladistics, and the Search for the Alaskan Ancestors of the Paleoindians: A Reassessment of Relationships among the Clovis, Nenana, and Denali Archaeological Complexes,"  Journal of Archaeological Science,  v.35,  2008,  p. 1683.

Buchanan, Briggs; Collard, Mark.  "Investigating the Peopling of North America through Cladistic Analyses of Early Paleoindian Projectile Points,"  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,  v.26,  2007,  p. 366.

Hamilton, Marcus; Buchanan, Briggs.  "Spatial Gradients in Clovis-age Radiocarbon Dates across North America Suggest Rapid Colonization from the North,"  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,  v.104,  2007,  p. 15625.


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