Increasing the relevance of mathematical approaches to demographic history

In this short paper we comment on recent efforts at formally modelling the interplay between demography and cultural evolution. We draw attention to the fact that, although these efforts are to be applauded, much work has already been done in this area, and that this work is being ignored. We build a case for tighter collaboration between different social science disciplines concerned with human behaviour and long-term demography, and argue that mathematical models must be paired with empirical data.     

Climate reversals and the transition to agriculture

The transition to agriculture is generally acknowledged to be the economic foundation for population growth over the last 10,000 years and for modern civilization itself. Dates for pristine transitions to agriculture have become a key input into empirical work on economic growth over the very long run. We propose a model of the transition in which population and technology respond endogenously to climate. The available data on the southwest Asian case, other cases of pristine transition, and cases of non-transition are consistent with our model, but often inconsistent with rival explanations. In addition, our theory of the origins of agriculture has implications for instrumental variable strategies that can be used in empirical research on long run economic growth and development.      

If you dig it, they will come!: Archaeology heritage sites and tourism development in Belize, Central America

Tapping into a growing global tourism market, in recent years the Government of Belize has been marketing and promoting tourism as its primary economic sector. The latest efforts have included the cruise ship sector and marketing Mayan cultural history for tourism. Three phases of Mayan excavation can be identified: (1) pre-mid-1990s when sites were scientific exercises with tourism following; (2) the 1990s to present with the archaeological digs such as at Caracol fostering tourism development as the project is undertaken; and, (3) future sites yet to be excavated. This paper explores the positive and negative impacts of developing Mayan sites for tourism in Belize. The results are based on a survey of face-to-face interviews conducted with tourists based in San Ignacio, a community in west-central Belize. San Ignacio is adjacent to the Cahal Pech archaeological site and within a short drive of the Xunantunich and Caracol sites. Caracol is only partially excavated with temporary infrastructure providing access to tourists. In fact, the income generated from this access pays for continued excavations. The findings indicate that while there are obvious educational and economic benefits for such development, there are also concerns about how much is too much.     

Lithuanian genocide heritage as discursive formation

This paper presents a synthesis of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and the concept of discursive formation to critique museums and sites of memory as spaces in which competing discourses of cultural identity emerge. The research context is the troublesome place of genocide and victimhood in discourses of occupation in Lithuanian museums and sites of memory. Analysis suggests that these exhibitions produce a rarefied field of knowledge around the ideas and concepts that they reveal, and, as discursive tourism texts, they play a role in maintaining the cultural identity of Lithuania. The contribution offers a novel, post-structuralist framework for understanding exhibitions as sites of discourse production, since it is the first study to deploy the ideas from Archaeology of Knowledge into an analysis of specific heritage sites.     

Corbelled Domes in Two and Three Dimensions: The Treasury of Atreus

Before the development of the true dome, many ancient cultures used the technique of corbelling to roof spaces. Recently, a series of related statistical models have been proposed in the literature for explaining how corbelled domes might have been constructed. The most sophisticated of these models is based on a piecewise linear structure, with an unknown number of changepoints, to guide the building process. This model is analyzed by the reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique. All models considered to date have been two-dimensional, that is, they have taken a single cross section through the dome; even when more extensive data, in the form of measurements on multiple slices through the dome, have been available, these have been averaged together for the purposes of analysis. In this paper, we extend the two-dimensional analysis to a three-dimensional analysis, that takes full advantage of the data collected by the archaeologists and of the rotational symmetries inherent in the structure.We also explore ways of graphically presenting the results from a complex, reversible jump MCMC implementation, in order to check convergence, good mixing, and appropriate exploration of the (high dimensional and varying dimension) parameter space. The model and the graphical techniques are demonstrated on the Treasury of Atreus in Mycenae, Greece, one of the finest extant examples of the corbelling method.