79 Number 67, December 2008 THREE STYLES OF DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IN THE ANALYSIS OF STONE ARTEFACTS: Which One to Use in Mainland Southeast Asia? Ben Marwick Abstract Our understanding of flaked stone artefacts from assemblages in mainland Southeast Asia is constrained by a shortage of robust and flexible theory to generate suitable methods of analysis. I review three candidate theories derived from Darwinian evolutionary principles to identify the most suitable for investigating flaked stone artefacts from mainland Southeast Asia. The demands of the theory are compared with the evidential constraints of the assemblages. Human behavioural ecology is found to be the most suitable because of the reliable methods available to test predictions with artefact assemblages. A small case study is discussed to demonstrate the applicability of this approach. Introduction One of Sandra Bowdler’s lesser known research interests involves Sigmund Freud and his ideas about archaeology and the past (Bowdler 1996). This paper is not about Sigmund Freud, but his work is a convenient lens through which the history of psychology in the nineteenth century may be viewed as a development away from philosophy towards biology (Young 1990). Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 when Freud was two years old and was one of eight of Darwin’s books that is known from Freud’s library (Ritvo 1990). By the late 1890s when Freud was well established in private practice, Darwin’s contributions were ubiquitous. For example, Darwinism pervaded the emerging discipline of child psychology (where Darwin was an important pioneer), reinforced the importance of sexuality in understanding psychopathology, raised the possibility of historical reductionism (where the past can be used as the key to understanding the present), and contributed concepts like fixation and regression to Freud’s overall theory of psychopathology (Sulloway 1979). Darwin’s significance in this shift from philosophy to biology is that he provided psychologists with two simple instinctual drives that underlie behaviour, namely the will to survive and the urge to reproduce. This paper is about the application of Darwinian concepts in archaeology to a region in which Bowdler has been especially active and provocative, Southeast Asia. Since Freud’s death, Darwinian thinking has grown substantially in complexity and influence, especially in the biological sciences. Freud’s work and influence has taken a slightly different trajectory, especially since the publication of his unexpurgated correspondence with Berlin physician Wilhem Fliess that called into question Freud’s scientific judgement and originality (Masson 1985; Sulloway 1991). However, since Freud and perhaps because of his own influence, the human sciences have been ambivalent about employing Darwinian analytical tools. Although parallels or analogies between biological evolution and cultural evolution have long been noted by eminent authors from diverse disciplines in the human sciences (Huxley 1955; Kidder 1932; Kroeber 1960; Popper 1979), it has only been very recently that the details of how to productively employ Darwinian thinking have begun to be realised (Mesoudi et al. 2006). The aim of this paper is to pragmatically examine the usefulness of three distinctive applications of Darwinian evolutionary concepts to archaeology, in particular the analysis of flaked stone artefacts in mainland Southeast Asia. This aim is motivated by a series of brief but provocative and significant papers by Bowdler (1994a, 1994b, 2006; Bowdler and Tan 2003) on the geographical range and cultural affinities of the Hoabinhian, a distinctive flaked stone artefact technology found in mainland Southeast Asia from the late Pleistocene to the middle Holocene (Moser 2001). Bowdler’s contributions in this area are notable for sidestepping the frothy debates about how to define the Hoabinhian that have characterised much of the literature. Instead she draws attention to the details of the stone artefact assemblages and focuses her analysis on salient metric and morphological variables. These approaches are likely to form the foundations of future work as hunter-gatherer archaeology in mainland Southeast Asia matures. However, few other writers are likely to bring Bowdler’s combination of empiricism and creativity to mainland Southeast Asian archaeology. This paper hopes to build on Bowdler’s work on flaked stone artefacts by identifying a promising evolutionary framework to interpret variation in metric and morphological variables in mainland Southeast Asian assemblages. The reason why Bowdler’s work naturally leads to a consideration of evolutionary approaches is that she eschews the typological methods that have dominated previous work in favour of consideration of a greater part of the assemblage. This replacement of typological methods by population-level methods resembles what Ernst Mayr (1970; see also Chung 2003) has identified as the key scientific contribution made by Darwin. Mayr claims that Darwin introduced into the scientific literature a new way of thinking, ‘population thinking’. This approach to classification holds that phenomena cannot exist as discrete entities because they are always in the process of becoming something else. No two things are ever exactly alike because similar things do not share an essence; they are just at similar points in the process of becoming something else. The population-thinker sees individual things that are composed of unique features and when these things are grouped together they form populations that are described by statistical abstractions such as mean and measures of variation (Mayr 1959). Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Box 353100, Seattle, WA 98195-3100, USA bmarwick@u.washington.edu