Toy story: homophily, transmission and the use of simple models in assessing variability in the archaeological record
2020
The interpretation of spatial and temporal patterns in the archaeological record remains
a long-standing issue in the discipline. Amongst many methods and interpretations,
modelling of ‘biased transmission’ has proved a successful strategy to tackle this
problem. Here, we investigate a type of biased transmission, homophily, that is the
tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. In contrast to other
social sciences, homophily remains underused in archaeology. In order to fill this gap,
we develop six distinct variants of a well-established modelling framework borrowed
from social science, Axelrod’s Cultural Dissemination Model. These so-called toy
models are abstract models used for theory-building and aim at exploring the interplay
between homophily and various factors (e.g. addition of spatial features such as
mountains and coastlines, diffusion of innovations and population spread). The relevance and implications of each ‘toy model’ for archaeological reasoning are then
discussed.
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