Cultural Niche Construction Theory

William Denevan argued that pristine landscapes are a myth, including in Amazonia—imagined by many as one of the last bastions of pristine Nature. During the last century, evidence accumulated to show that humans domesticated Nature during the Holocene by creating cultural niches in all habitable regions of the planet. This process of cultural niche construction is the result of human agency, grounded on culturally transmitted ecological knowledge to domesticate landscapes, and plant and animal populations, thus increasing human carrying capacity. The expansion of culturally constructed niches during the Holocene does not mean that every inch of the habitable planet became a garden; rather, there is a mosaic of landscapes domesticated to different degrees, especially forests. Consequently, domesticated landscapes depend upon their humans, even though humans can also degrade these landscapes, which gave rise to the Anthropocene concept. As a result, Edward O. Wilson proposed that half of the biosphere be set aside for Nature. Many prime areas for the half-Earth proposal are tropical forests, all with high linguistic diversity; Borneo, New Guinea, the Congo, and Amazonia are examples. Since all of Nature in the habitable regions of the planet is cultural to some degree, setting aside half requires partnership with local human populations, rather than their exclusion, which is too common today. Their participation is essential, because it is their niche construction activities that resulted in what we call Nature and without them Nature will change—through natural processes—into something different from that which we plan to conserve.

Late precolonial (c. 800-1500 CE) culinary practices in the northern Caribbean have received limited investigations. Determining foodways has been integral for the study of cultures, yet there has never been a comparison of foodway dynamics in the Caribbean between the Greater Antilles (the presumed origin of people who migrated into The Bahamas) and the Bahama archipelago. The objective of our study was to analyze microbotanical residues (starches) extracted from 45 clay griddles (food preparation platters) to illuminate a partial view of the phytocultural repertoire of this region and explicate variations of the identified culinary practices. The griddles were excavated from three archaeological sites: El Flaco and La Luperona in northwestern Dominican Republic and Palmetto Junction on the western coast of Providenciales, Turks & Caicos Islands. Regarding the production of plant-based food on griddles, our produced data suggests that the people who lived at El Flaco focused on the production of maize (Zea mays L.) derivatives, La Luperona residents prepared guáyiga/coontie/ zamia (Zamia spp.) food products, and Palmetto Junction ostensibly had a focus on the production of manioc (Manihot esculenta Crantz) based foods. This survey of food-ways has exposed particular cultural niches, different adaptation strategies, and associated culinary practices. Resumen Las prácticas culinarias precoloniales (c. 800-1500 CE) en el norte del Caribe han sido investigadas de manera limitida. Determinar lasdimensiones de la alimentación ha sido fundamental en el estudio de las culturas; no obstante, en el Caribe nunca se ha realizado unacomparación de estas dinámicas entre las Antillas Mayores (el atribuido origen migratorio de humanos a las Bahamas) y el archipiélago delas Bahamas. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar los residuos microbotánicos (almidones) extraídos Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory https://doi.

Around the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene in southwest Asia, human skills in cultural
niche construction were qualitatively upgraded in order to support the formation of large, permanently
co-resident communities and regional interaction networks with new and sophisticated forms of sym-
bolic action and representation. The transition from small, mobile forager bands to networks of large
permanent communities that occurred between 22,000 and 8500 years ago was enabled by the signif-
icant development of what Merlin Donald has called‘theoretic culture’, communicated and stored in
systems of‘external symbolic storage’. The over-arching role of symbolic culture became the highly
developed core of what we may call the cognitive-cultural niche, within which and by means of which
children learned and adults understood and expressed their identity and their place in the world. The
extraordinary plasticity of the modern human brain and its developmental responsiveness to context
meant that individuals formed their identity through a long process of enculturation within a cognitively
powerful cultural niche. While we are accustomed to literacy and dependence on written sources, they
were more adept with other media, particularly ceremonies and rituals, and the making of memory in
monuments, artistic representations, signs and systems of

In this chapter, in contrast to previous works on this topic, we expect to provide additional answers to the question of why humans initiated the peopling of the Antilles based on the zooarchaeological and paleoetnobotanical information available from five very early archaeological sites (ca. 8000 to 4000 cal. yrs. BP) of the region. In particular, we would like to test if domestic plants were a potential triggering factor that influenced decisions surrounding the earliest processes of mobilization into the Caribbean islands, taking into consideration that most, if not all, of the earliest sites in the Antilles where paleoethnobotanical research has been conducted have registered the factual use of domestic plants. This, together with the important role that maritime navigation played in human and plant dispersals during this early period, will provide the basis to explore the feasibility of diet breadth (DB) and ideal free distribution (IFD) models for understanding these early human dispersals toward the islands. Together with other theoretical constructs derived from experiential philosophy and phenomenology, we will argue that the use of domestic plants by the earliest settlers of the Antilles was a primum mobile of the initial peopling of the region.

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In this paper I seek to show how cultural niche construction theory offers the potential to extend the human evolutionary story beyond the Pleistocene, through the Neolithic, towards the kind of very large-scale societies in which we live today. The study of the human past has been compartmentalised, each compartment using different analytical vocabularies, so that their accounts are written in mutually incompatible languages. In recent years social, cognitive and cultural evolutionary theories, building on a growing body of archaeological evidence, have made substantial sense of the social and cultural evolution of the genus Homo. However, specialists in this field of studies have found it difficult to extend their kind of analysis into the Holocene human world. Within southwest Asia the three or four millennia of the Neolithic period at the beginning of the Holocene represents a pivotal point, which saw the transformation of human society in the emergence of the first large-scale, permanent communities, the domestication of plants and animals , and the establishment of effective farming economies. Following the Neo-lithic, the pace of human social, economic and cultural evolution continued to increase. By 5000 years ago, in parts of southwest Asia and northeast Africa there were very large-scale urban societies, and the first large-scale states (kingdoms). An extension of cultural niche construction theory enables us to extend the evolutionary narrative of the Pleistocene into the Holocene, opening the way to developing a single, long-term, evolutionary account of human history.

The term ‘neolithization’ as it is generally used in relation to southwest Asia narrows the focus of research, and works against our efforts to envision explanations of the process in terms of the long-term evolution of human societies. Here, we re-frame the neolithization process, setting it within the framework of niche construction theory. We argue that the concept of cultural niche construction fits the purpose, but needs to be extended to encompass the more complex social worlds of the Holocene in the form of the cognitive-cultural niche.

A complete theory of human evolution needs to explain not only our genetic development but also our cultural developments. Two interesting theories that have been put forward in this regard are Memetics and Cultural Niche Construction. In this paper, first memetic theory will be presented, as introduced by Richard Dawkins, and subsequently developed by Susan Blackmore. Then, two fatal objections by Boyd & Richerson and by Plotkin will be raised. Accordingly, we will focus on Cultural Niche Construction and provide reasons why this explanatory framework does not suffer from the same drawbacks as memetics. Furthermore, we will show how Cultural Niche Construction stands on stronger epistemological grounds, as it accords with the most recent developments in Cognitive Anthropology, as argued by Andy Clark.

Archaeologists have continually added new techniques of scientific analysis and interpretation, but the processualist archaeology of Binford and Flannery in the 1960s proposed that the central task was to set prehistoric archaeology within an ecosystems (i.e., ecological, and evolutionary) context. Evolutionary theory has expanded and developed significantly, especially over the last two decades, especially in the areas of gene-culture co-evolution and cultural niche construction theory. This paper proposes that, by using the new and still developing cultural evolutionary frameworks, we can explain our archaeological observations – for example, of the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation. In this way archaeologists can not only understand the processes at work within the period of our own particular interest, but at the same time we can contribute to the better understanding of where our period of interest fits within the greater scheme of human cultural evolution.

(Proof of chapter in Ritual, Play and Belief in Early Human Societies, eds. C. Renfrew, I. Morley & M. Boyd Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) We have a series of early Neolithic sites in central and south- east Turkey, north and west Syria, Israel and Jordan that have produced fascinating imagery, enigmatic sculptures, monumental architecture and much evidence of elaborate ritual behaviours: and we also have a great deal of new research in the fields of cognitive and evolutionary psychology. My concern has been to bring some of these new cognitive and co- evolutionary ideas into contact with the new archaeological material. In particular, I want to explore how the impressive displays of symbolism and ritual performance that emerged as part of this great social transformation functioned in the context of the new, large, permanent communities that created them. I argue that the extraordinary levels of symbolism in architecture, artefacts and ritual functioned in the service of the construction and sustenance of a new and extraordinary kind of community and identity.

Les sciences cognitives et les sciences sociales n'ont pas atteint un niveau de connexion qui permet un échange paradigmatique suffisant pour développer adéquatement des modèles complexes. Grâce aux théories des affordances, les différentes disciplines peuvent trouver un point d'arrimage clément pour développer des modèles d'interactions sociales. Spécifiquement, il est possible de faire une analyse critique dans une optique féministe de la dynamique d'interaction entre des individus dans des groupes en opposition oppresseur/opprimé. Nous pouvons décliner ces interactions en termes d'asymétries d'affordances, déterminées par les niches culturelles (ou sociales), et en analyser les liens avec les injustices épistémiques. Mots-clés : affordance, pouvoir, niche culturelle, injustices épistémiques Les relations interpersonnelles sont empreintes de dynamiques de pouvoir. Les analyses de ces relations peuvent donc s'avérer complexes à réaliser et présentent le risque de considérer les personnes en situation de vulnérabilité comme des individus sans agentivité ou sans pouvoir.

Archaeological investigations into late iron age and medieval coastal soci­eties in Sweden have been focusing on a maritime culture, a traditional coastal and island-dwelling fisher-farmer and activities centered on fishing in a long maritime tradition as well as a specific maritime identity and ha­bi­tus. By deconstructing commonly used concepts and by using primarily written sources, it is here shown that there is a need for putting this culture and its agents into perspective by opening up the history of the maritime interspace and let in previously overlooked or disregarded historical actors in the narrative field dominated by men and landed farmers, such as landless, powerless, strangers, foreig­ners and women. The coast is shown to have been an arena for opportunism, societal expansion under landed gentry, nodes for pro­cure­ment and social oppression and focal points for inter-cultural contacts, trade, networking and self-realization and that the role of the islands and the “fisheries” was constantly remolded to fit different power strategies. Through a series of case studies, seldom discussed social relations, social groups and social predicaments are unmasked and discussed; the relation between norse and proto-Saami cultures, the role of women in fishing, em­ploy­ment of the poor or serfs, of incentives by strangers and foreig­ners. Many localities speak of con­flict, struggle and self-sought or forced marginal­ization; the emer­­gence of taxa­tion and the control of fishing, piracy and insurgency but also of exile, reclusion and asceticism. Running through history there has been a dicho­tomy and tension between the workforce and the benefactor, between small-scale and large-scale maritime procurement, between cooper­ation and con­flict and between the meeting place and the hidden refuge. To conclude, the study sketches the ethno genesis of the hitherto “fisher-farmer” and exposes a wider set of actors and their strategies in the maritime space and ends with advocating a series of potentially fruitful research frameworks of study; cultural niches in the maritime environment, actor geographies in the out­back, the use of maritime produce in societal transformations, and to further investigate the harsh, hidden or exposed, islands as places for sociocultural and economical strategies with profound social, psychological and spiritual impact

The aim of this chapter is to investigate changes and continuities of human moral systems from an evolutionary and socio-historical perspective. Specifically, I will argue that these systems can be approached through the lens of non-genetic inheritance systems and niche construction. I will examine morality from a comparative socio-historical perspective. From this, I suggest that these inheritance systems are cognitively scaffolded, and that these scaffolds are part of the nucleus of the historical Mesoamerican cosmovision.