ABSTRACT
Investigations of cultural transmission have focused on two debates. First, different accounts of human history and cultural diversification have stressed either blending or branching processes of cultural transmission. The second set of debates is related directly to this "branching versus blending" debate and involves issues of the size and time scale of coherent units of culture. This chapter employs the null model that new cultural assemblages arise entirely through the bifurcation of ancestral ones. The main branching of the cultural trees frequently isolates a culturally distinct northern subarea. Progressive bifurcation is less typical of these more northerly tribes, which share many cultural attributes. Bifurcating lineages characterize the evolution of structures and marriage, especially among the groups of Vancouver Island, and the branching pattern among these traits for the southern Kwakiutl and Nootka is almost identical, suggesting that together these cultural assemblages constitute a larger cultural package.
