ABSTRACT
In recent years there have emerged exciting multidisciplinary strands in the revival of history within anthropology. These strands combine macrolevel comparison with the analysis of long-term evolution, suggestive of a neo-Boasian paradigm. Three things stand out from these analyses. First, at the local level we do not find strong evidence for linguistic signal in traits relating to family and kinship; this runs counter to the suggestion of a faithfully transmitted family-kinship core. Second, traits associated with politics and ritual show stronger linguistic signal; this is more consistent with continent-wide quantitative studies and observations on core cultural traditions identified by historians. Third, traits associated with making a living show considerable linguistic signal and probably reflect daughter populations settling in an environment similar to that of their parent populations. To determine the degree to which cultural traits share a common history based on linguistic phylogeny, we applied two tests of phylogenetic independence available for discretely coded data.
