ABSTRACT

Phylogeny - the genealogical history of a group, in which ancestor-descendant relationships are hypothesised - has long been a focus of anthropological study. The basis of this focus is the notion that cultural forms of various scales are descended from other forms. The phenomena of interest, however, irrespective of whether they are belief systems, lexical constructs or artefacts, are rarely observed in original chronological sequence. Constructing such a sequence might suggest phylogenetic relationships, but the chronological ordering does not answer questions of heritability and of which form was ancestral to, and thus produced, another. That is a phylogenetic question, and to answer it requires the use of phylogenetic methods, several of which appeared early on in Americanist anthropology. These included seriation, the comparative method, and the direct historical approach. All rested on the implicit assumption of phylogenetic descent. By the 1930s some were beginning to suspect that, as in biology, patterns of descent could be mapped by using homologous characters (Kroeber 1931). Biologists, however, had a theory - genetic transmission - to explain relationships; anthropologists mentioned cultural transmission but built no theory around it. They adopted the view that two things similar in appearance must be related, instead of the theoretically informed view that two things are similar because they are related (Simpson 1961).