ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The fascinating and indispensable collection of chapters on ethnicity presented here extends the state of the art in this field and demonstrates that the subject continues to provoke interesting and innovative work, despite its innumerable treatments in different guises over the past hundred years. The strengths of the chapters in the book, the influence of the Francophone techniques et cultures school on Africanist research, stems from the fact that it has developed a research programme in many respects parallel to that of cultural evolution. Fundamental to the cultural evolutionary programme in archaeology and anthropology is the process of cultural transmission. Shennan and Wilkinson showed that patterning in the frequency through time of decorative attributes of early Neolithic pottery from a small region of Germany indicated a more even distribution of variants than expected under neutral evolution.
