Cultural evolutionary models that relate spatial and temporal patterning in artifact sequences to human social learning processes and history have made many recent advances. Specifically, these models connect evolutionary forces and social leaning mechanisms along cultural pathways with expectations that can be assessed using material culture. In this dissertation, I use an historical archaeology case study of carved New England gravestones to evaluate three different aspects of cultural transmission and artifact patterns. First, I study the role of social network structure in the transmission of cultural information among carvers organized in workshops that were principally comprised of a carver and his apprentices. The results of this study suggest that the motifs reflect widespread similarity that transcends workshop organization. However, the finer grained decorative elements that make up these motifs correspond with cultural lineages of gravestone carvers. Second, I examine the relationship between the diffusion of innovations and cultural transmission mechanisms that result in spatiotemporal patterning. The spatial patterning suggests that social contagion among consumers created brief instances of wave-like diffusion from a distinct workshop, highlighting the role of consumer choice. A review of probate payments shows that gravestones were rarely purchased from distance sources, as transport costs could be prohibitive. The spatial patterning and historic record suggest that carvers also learned from other carvers creating a hierarchical diffusion process. These two populations created a feedback mechanism that leads to complex emergent phenomena, as illustrated by the rapid and widespread adoption of the cherub motif. Third, the neutral model of stylistic variation is applied to gravestone data to examine the ways that increased consumption and an expanding carving industry led to dominant decorative motifs. This study shows that neutrality can be a fleeting and transitional state between the dominance of single decorative styles. These three studies use New England gravestones to illustrate the evolutionary forces and cultural transmission mechanisms among artifact producers and consumers, which generated the stylistic patterning we observe in the archaeological record.

This thesis investigates historic settlement pattern changes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through shifting scales of selection derived from evolutionary theory. Artifacts from 65 archaeological sites were used to establish mean dates, site function, and duration of occupation. Geographic Information Systems analysis of these data and related historical records was used to investigate success and failure of farmsteads. Settlements in the study area developed over time from a rural, subsistence-based pattern of isolated farmsteads, to one including local communities with specialist professions, to a more specialized, market-driven urban settlement pattern. The results show that market-oriented agricultural strategies, like cotton farming and beef production, along with the development of peripheral urban economic centers led to the development and abandonment of rural farmsteads in Kemper and Lauderdale counties. These shifts occurred rapidly, indicating that they were the result of selection acting on entire settlement/subsistence systems and at various scales over time.

Archaeological considerations of mobility have primarily focused on the differences in and among the kinds or degrees of mobility itself, rather than addressing the underlying issue of why human settlement patterns were or are mobile. The focus of this study is to address such questions within Darwinian evolutionary theory. Using the concepts of bet-hedging, as used in biology, and waste, as used in archaeology, it is argued that mobility was selectively favored for its population limiting properties. Relative changes in the numbers of projectile points in each assigned class, ordered chronologically by seriation, were taken to indicate relative population change over time. The results of this study suggest, primarily, that rapid, drastic population growth did not occur until the abandonment of mobility in the Gulf Formational period. This result supports the expectations of the hypothesis that was tested and indicates that in this instance mobility is a bet-hedging behavior.

This thesis explores the nature and emergence of early body ornamentation, which has long been at the forefront of the debate on modern human origins. According to most prehistorians, ornamental shell beads are unequivocal proxies for behavioural and cognitive "modernity", for they are considered the arbitrary products of symbolically-capable brains. In my dissertation, I argue against the "symbolic" dictum of reducing material signification to linguistic terms, and attributing its creation to a representational mechanism. For one, the significative meaning of material culture is not entirely arbitrary, because concepts can be founded on physical properties and affordances. Moreover, material signification is not the epiphenomenal product of innate cognitive modules, for the mind is not a computational device that processes internal representations before externalising them through behaviour. I thus suggest that these theoretical fallacies about the nature and emergence of material signification can be overcome by combining a pragmatic semiotic approach with an enactive theory of cognition. Briefly put, a pragmatic semiotic theory describes the nature of material signification by recognising that significative concepts can be founded on physical qualities and relations, whereas an enactive theory of cognition accounts for the emergence of material signification by explaining how significative concepts are brought forth via the constitutive entwinement of mind and matter. Through the synergistic fusion of these theoretical tenets, the origins of early body ornamentation can be examined from a developmental perspective that treats the generation of significative meaning as the emergent product of material engagement. In its light, the preoccupation of most evolutionary archaeologists with the notion of "modernity" appears to be inherently problematic. It is therefore ultimately proposed that the dominant symbolic interpretation of material signification need be replaced with a pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics that is suitably geared to trace the evolution of prehistoric material signs.

There is a universally recognized need for a more refined chronological understanding of the Early Holocene in the Southeast. The Paleoindian/Early Archaic period deposits at the Hester site provide an opportunity to refine the local chronology for northeast Mississippi. Three-dimensional spatial analysis of these deposits revealed the presence of at least four distinct occupations. Attribute-level morphological analysis of projectile points excavated from these occupations indicated that base width, shoulder width, and basal indentation ratio, changed significantly through time. A paradigmatic classification system employing these attributes was used to classify the projectile points from Hester. These classes were successfully seriated indicating that they are true historical classes. The range of historical classes indicates that this alternative to the traditional point typology may provide greater chronological precision for the Early Holocene in northeast Mississippi.

Site 38CH1693 is a coastal site located in Charleston County, South Carolina. Thom’s Creek ceramics place the site in the Late Archaic/Early Woodland Period and radiocarbon dating corroborates this, placing the features present between 3650 and 3950 BP. Faunal analysis was undertaken to assess seasonality in order to understand the occupations that occurred at the site. Faunal seasonality, botanical seasonality, and sedentariness indicators are used to determine the sedentariness of the site. The presence of certain marine fish species is one of the most important seasonality indicators used. It is determined from the available evidence that at least one short-duration, year-round occupation is represented by the materials recovered at 38CH1693. Site 38CH1693 does not fit into the current Late Archaic settlement pattern models for the coast, calling for a reevaluation of these settlement pattern models and the sedentary sites within them.

Kinlock is a freshwater mussel shell ring site located in Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta. Little work has been done at freshwater mussel shell rings, and therefore little is known about them. This thesis uses four different data collection methods to answer questions of chronology, site layout, etc. These four methods are controlled surface collection, excavation, coring, and magnetometry. Based on the results of these methods, Kinlock was found to be a Woodland period mussel shell ring with a later Mississippian period component built on top of the shell. This later component consisted of five mounds situated around a plaza. It was also found that the plaza was planned and maintained from the Woodland period through the Mississippian period, until the site was abandoned.