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Modeling Spatial Innovation Diffusion from Radiocarbon Dates and Regression Residuals: The Case of Early Old World Pottery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2016

Fabio Silva ,
James Steele ,
Kevin Gibbs  and
Peter Jordan
Fabio Silva
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, UK School of AHA, University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter SA48 7ED, UK
James Steele
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, UK SGAES, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Kevin Gibbs
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UF, UK Archaeological Research Facility, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Peter Jordan*
Affiliation:
Arctic Centre, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article introduces a method of exploratory analysis of the geographical factors influencing large-scale innovation diffusion, and illustrates its application to the case of early pottery dispersal in the Old World. Regression techniques are used to identify broad-scale spatiotemporal trends in the innovation's first occurrence, and regression residuals are then analyzed to identify geographical variation (climate, biomes) that may have influenced local rates of diffusion. The boundaries between the modeled diffusion zones segregate the western half of the map into a Eurasian hunter-gatherer pottery-using zone affiliated by cultural descent to the Siberian center of innovation, and a lower-latitude farming and pastoralist zone affiliated by cultural descent to the north African center of innovation. However, the correlation coefficients suggest that this baseline model has limited explanatory power, with geographical patterning in the residuals indicating that habitat also greatly affected rates of spread of the new technology. Earlier-than-predicted ages for early pottery tend to occur in locations with mean annual temperature in the range approximately 0–15°. This favorable temperature range typically includes Mediterranean, grassland, and temperate forest biome types, but of these, the Mediterranean and the temperate deciduous forest biomes are the only ones on which regression residuals indicate earlier-than-predicted first observed pottery dates.

Type
Eurasian Archaeology
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , 2014 , pp. 723 - 732
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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