EVOLUTIONARY ARCHAEOLOGY OR EVOLUTIONARY ARCHAEOLOGIES? FROM PROGRESSIONISM TO THE PURSUIT OF A DARWINIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

The path to a Darwin-inspired evolutionary framework has had a historical development that should be addressed to comprehend how it came to be and how its application in archaeology has had different iterations, some of them far from what can be considered a Darwinian approach. The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of processes more related to what Darwin espoused as descent with modification by contextualising the theoretical framework of different evolutionary archaeologies using Darwin’s original concept of evolution espoused in 1859. I use Richard Dawkins’ concept of Universal Darwinism, further developed and explained in detail by Sydow and used extensively by Richard Nelson in evolutionary economics.