Mark Collard

Simon Fraser University, Human Evolutionary Studies Program, Faculty Member

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Wenner-Gren Symposia, Participant

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http://profmarkcollard.com/
Supervisors: Bernard Wood, Leslie Aiello, and Marek Zvelebil
Address: Department of Archaeology,
Simon Fraser University,
8888 University Drive,
Burnaby,
BC V5A 1S6,
Canada.

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Papers by Mark Collard

Handbook of Archaeological Theories

This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the... more This handbook gathers original, authoritative articles from leading archaeologists to compile the latest thinking about archaeological theory. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the theoretical foundations by which archaeologists contextualize and analyze their archaeological data. Student readers will also gain a sense of the immense power that theory has for building interpretations of the past, while recognizing the wonderful archaeological traditions that created it. An extensive bibliography is included. This volume is the single most important reference for current information on contemporary archaeological theories.

Religious belief and cooperation in Viking societies

The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2017

Mobility, spatial heterogeneity, and the adaptiveness of monument building: A test of Dunnell’s waste hypothesis

Monuments are perplexing from a Darwinian perspective because building them diverts energy from s... more Monuments are perplexing from a Darwinian perspective because building them diverts energy from survival and reproduction. In the late 1980s, Dunnell proposed a solution to this conundrum. He suggested that wasting energy confers an adaptive advantage in highly variable environments. This hypothesis has been used to explain several instances of monument building but it has only been evaluated once and that study suggested it is flawed. Here, we report a series of experiments in which we used an agent-based model to assess the hypothesis while taking into account two factors that could enhance the adaptiveness of waste—restricted agent movement and spatial structure in resource availability. Waste was strongly selected against in most of the experiments. Two experiments suggested that very restricted mobility can select for waste, but this effect disappeared when environmental variation increased from moderate to high. Thus, our experiments also suggest that the waste hypothesis is flawed.

Patterns, Processes, and Parsimony

University of Arizona Press eBooks, Jul 12, 2022

“Rogue” Taxa and Hominin Phylogeny

The 86th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, New Orleans, 2017

The evolutionary relationships and age of Homo naledi: An assessment using dated Bayesian phylogenetic methods

Journal of Human Evolution, Aug 1, 2016

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A Community Bioarchaeology Project in the Flinders Group, Queensland, Australia

Archaeologies

Bioarchaeological research in Australia has lagged behind that in other regions due to understand... more Bioarchaeological research in Australia has lagged behind that in other regions due to understandable concerns arising from the disregard of Indigenous Australians rights over their ancestors' remains. To improve this situation, bioarchaeologists working in Australia need to employ more communityoriented approaches to research. This paper reports a project in which we employed such an approach. The project focused on burials in the Flinders Group, Queensland. Traditional Owners played a key role in the excavations and helped devise analyses that would deliver both scientific contributions and socially relevant outcomes. The fieldwork and laboratory analyses yielded a number of interesting results. Most significantly, they revealed that the pattern of mortuary practices recorded by ethnographers in the region in the early

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Breastfeeding and ovulatory status affect δ15N values: Evidence from living Maya women from Guatemala

List of fossil hypodigms

List of fossil hypodigm

Author Correction: Population genomics of the Viking world

Nature, 2021

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Viking skeletal remains in northern Europe: a survey

Age, body size, and reproductive status affect δ13C and δ15N values: Evidence from living Maya women from Guatemala

Hidden in plain sight: the archaeological landscape of Mithaka Country, south-west Queensland

Antiquity, 2021

Ethnohistoric accounts indicate that the people of Australia's Channel Country engaged in act... more Ethnohistoric accounts indicate that the people of Australia's Channel Country engaged in activities rarely recorded elsewhere on the continent, including food storage, aquaculture and possible cultivation, yet there has been little archaeological fieldwork to verify these accounts. Here, the authors report on a collaborative research project initiated by the Mithaka people addressing this lack of archaeological investigation. The results show that Mithaka Country has a substantial and diverse archaeological record, including numerous large stone quarries, multiple ritual structures and substantial dwellings. Our archaeological research revealed unknown aspects, such as the scale of Mithaka quarrying, which could stimulate re-evaluation of Aboriginal socio-economic systems in parts of ancient Australia.

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A Cross-cultural Survey of On-site Fire Use by Recent Hunter-gatherers: Implications for Research on Palaeolithic Pyrotechnology

Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology, 2020

The ability to control fire clearly had a significant impact on human evolution, but when and how... more The ability to control fire clearly had a significant impact on human evolution, but when and how hominins developed this ability remains poorly understood. Improving our understanding of the history of hominin fire use will require not only additional fieldwork but also comparative analyses of fire use by ethnographicallydocumented hunter-gatherer groups. Here, we report a study that focused on the second of these tasks. In the study, we consulted ethnographic texts for a sample of 93 hunter-gatherer groups and collected data pertaining to fire use in settlements. We focused on the groups' methods of making fire, the ways in which they used fire, and when and where they created fires. While many of the observations were in line with expectations, some were surprising. Perhaps most notably, we found that several groups did not know how to make fire and that even within some of the groups who were able to make fire, the relevant knowledge was restricted to a very small number of individuals. Another surprising finding was that many groups preferred to preserve fire rather than creating it anew, to the point that they would carry it between camps. In the final section of the paper, we discuss the implications of the survey's findings for understanding the early archaeological record of fire use.

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Breastfeeding Duration and the Social Learning of Infant Feeding Knowledge in Two Maya Communities

Human Nature, 2020

Variation in the durations of exclusive breastfeeding (exBF) and any breastfeeding (anyBF) is ass... more Variation in the durations of exclusive breastfeeding (exBF) and any breastfeeding (anyBF) is associated with socioecological factors. This plasticity in breastfeeding behavior appears adaptive, but the mechanisms involved are unclear. With this concept in mind, we investigated whether durations of exBF and anyBF in a rural Maya population covary with markers of a form of socioecological change-market integration-and whether individual factors (individual learning, physiological plasticity) and/ or learning from others in the community (social learning, norm adherence) mediate these changes. Using data from 419 mother-child pairs from two Guatemalan Maya villages, we fit a bivariate linear mixed model. The model compared exBF and anyBF among children from households of varying degrees of market integration whose mothers follow what we inferred to be local infant-feeding norms. It controlled for other factors expected to affect breastfeeding durations. We found evidence that exBF is associated with whether mothers follow their population's infant feeding norms, but no evidence that exBF is associated with the household's level of market integration. Conversely, anyBF is significantly associated with the household's market integration, but not with the villages' inferred norms. Because deviations from exBF norms are likely to result in infant mortality and reduced fitness, we hypothesize that the incentive to conform is relatively strong. Relatively greater individual plasticity in anyBF allows mother-child pairs to tailor it to socioecological conditions. Deviations from anyBF norms may be tolerated because they may provide later-life health/fitness payoffs, while posing few risks to infant survival.

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Giving it a burl: towards the integration of genetics, isotope chemistry, and osteoarchaeology in Cape York, Tropical North Queensland, Australia

World Archaeology, 2019

In this paper we outline a worked example of the combined use of genetic data and archaeological ... more In this paper we outline a worked example of the combined use of genetic data and archaeological evidence. The project focuses on Queensland's Cape York Peninsula and has two goals. One is to shed new light on the population history of the region. The other is to develop a methodology to facilitate repatriation of the remains of Aboriginal Australians. After providing some background to the project and outlining its main activities, we summarize our key findings to date. Subsequently, we discuss what the project has taught us about the prehistory of Cape York, the potential for DNA research and isotope chemistry to assist research institutions and Aboriginal communities with the repatriation of unaffiliated remains, and the process of conducting combined genetic and archaeological research.

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Population genomics of the Viking world

The Viking maritime expansion from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) marks one of the swi... more The Viking maritime expansion from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) marks one of the swiftest and most far-flung cultural transformations in global history. During this time (c. 750 to 1050 CE), the Vikings reached most of western Eurasia, Greenland, and North America, and left a cultural legacy that persists till today. To understand the genetic structure and influence of the Viking expansion, we sequenced the genomes of 442 ancient humans from across Europe and Greenland ranging from the Bronze Age (c. 2400 BC) to the early Modern period (c. 1600 CE), with particular emphasis on the Viking Age. We find that the period preceding the Viking Age was accompanied by foreign gene flow into Scandinavia from the south and east: spreading from Denmark and eastern Sweden to the rest of Scandinavia. Despite the close linguistic similarities of modern Scandinavian languages, we observe genetic structure within Scandinavia, suggesting that regional population differences were already ...

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Agent-based model experiments refute Dunnell’s adaptive waste explanation for cultural elaboration

Ancient monuments represent a puzzle from the perspective of evolutionary theory. It is obvious t... more Ancient monuments represent a puzzle from the perspective of evolutionary theory. It is obvious that their construction would have been costly in terms of energy, but it is not clear how they would have enhanced reproductive success. In the late 1980s, the prominent US archaeologist Robert Dunnell proposed a solution to this conundrum. He argued that wasting energy on monuments and other forms of what he dubbed “cultural elaboration” would have conferred a selective advantage in highly variable environments. In the present paper, we report a study in which we used an agent-based model to test the core prediction of Dunnell’s hypothesis. In the model, the agents inherited a propensity to waste and were subjected to selection in low and high variability environments. The results we obtained do not support the hypothesis. We found that the propensity to waste was subject to strong negative selection regardless of the level of environmental variability. At the start of the simulation ru...

Transmission of Cultural Variants in the North American Paleolithic

Learning Strategies and Cultural Evolution during the Palaeolithic, 2015

North American fluted stone projectile points occur over a relatively short time span, ca. 13,300... more North American fluted stone projectile points occur over a relatively short time span, ca. 13,300–11,900 calBP, referred to as the Early Paleoindian period. One long-standing topic in Paleoindian archaeology is whether variation in the points is the result of drift or adaptation to regional environments. Studies have returned apparently conflicting results, but closer inspection shows that the results are not in conflict. At one scale—the overall pattern of flake removal—there appears to have been an early continent-wide mode of point manufacture, but at another scale—projectile-point shape—there appears to have been regional adaptive differences. In terms of learning models, the Early Paleoindian period appears to have been characterized by a mix of indirect-bias learning at the continent-wide level and guided variation at the regional level, the latter a result of continued experimentation with hafting elements and other point characters to match the changing regional environments. Close examination of character-state changes allows a glimpse into how Paleoindian knappers negotiated the design landscape in terms of character-state optimality of their stone weaponry.

The systematics of Homo-Response

Science, 1999

CrossRef is an independent membership association, founded and directed by publishers. CrossRef&#... more CrossRef is an independent membership association, founded and directed by publishers. CrossRef's mandate is to connect users to primary research content, by enabling publishers to do collectively what they can't do individually. CrossRef is also the official DOI registration agency for scholarly and professional publications. It operates a cross-publisher citation linking system that allows a researcher to click on a reference citation on one publisher's platform and link directly to the cited content on another publisher's platform, subject to the ...

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