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Research compendium for 'Design space constraints and the cultural taxonomy of European Final Palaeolithic large tanged points - a comparison of typological, landmark-based and whole-outline geometric morphometric approaches' The files at the URL above will generate the results as found in the publication. The files hosted at are the development versions and may have changed since the paper was published. Maintainer of this repository: David N. Matzig () Submitted to: Journal of Palaeolithic Archaeology Abstract: The identification of material culture variability remains an important goal in archaeology, as such variability is commonly coupled to interpretations of cultural transmission and adaptation. While most such archaeological cultures are defined on the basis of typology and research tradition, cultural evolutionary reasoning combined with computer-aided methods such as geometric morphometrics (GMM) sheds new light on the validity of many such entrenched groupings, especially in regard to Upper Palaeolithic projectile points in Europe. Little methodological consistency, however, makes it difficult to compare their conclusions. Here, we present an effort towards a benchmarked, case-transferrable toolkit for such approaches, comparatively exploring relevant techniques centered around outline-based GMM. First, we re-analyze and compare two previously conducted landmark-based analyses of stone artefacts against our whole-outline approach, finding that outlines offer an efficient and reliable alternative. We then show how a theory-driven application of clustering algorithms to GMM outline data is able to successfully discriminate between different distinctive tool shapes, and suggests that such data can even infer phylogenies matching typo-chronological patterns of cultural evolution. Finally, we apply these methods to a dataset of large tanged points from the North and Eastern European Final Palaeolithic (ca. ... |