Christina Alam

Adopting a new technology in the Bronze Age - Examining the transmission and adoption of ceramic innovations in Western Anatolia and the Aegean using a cultural evolutionary framework

The main aim of this project is to investigate the macro-scale factors that drove innovation adoption in the pottery technology of the Aegean and Western Anatolia during the Bronze Age, focusing on three stages of the chaîne opératoire of pottery production: forming, decoration, and firing. Cultural evolutionary literature has been a great influence regarding the framing of the research questions, focusing on factors that said literature has identified as important, e.g., population size and structure. The importance of long-distance networks that enabled communication between different communities of practice is also under investigation.

In order to examine different interpretations and test hypothesis about the factors that enabled innovation adoption, I will marshal available published evidence on the prevalence of forming, decorative, and firing traits from well-published sites, and synthesize them into a database that will help trace adoption curves over time. Those empirical adoption curves will then be compared to the outputs of equation-based simulations – which represent an abstract version of the adoption process unfolding through time under the conditions that the literature suggests led to the adoption of innovations during that time.

Another, related aim of the project is to critically evaluate the suitability of computational modelling to tackle questions about long-term change in material culture when the available data is published using the conventions of Aegean datasets, focusing on legacy data from site catalogues.

Education

• BA, History and Archaeology, majoring in Archaeology and History of Art, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2016

• MSc, Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, 2018