Fig. 1
A schematic figure outlining the difference between typological thinking and population thinking as implemented in regard to material culture variation. A given population (from which also archaeogenetic samples are taken) is seen as a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) composed of individuals of different age, sex, ability, access to knowledge and raw materials, here indicated by size and colour differences. Production processes and pedagogical practices in such past communities can sometimes be inferred in great detail (Donahue and Fischer, 2015; Bodu, 1996; Högberg, 2008). The artefacts produced in such communities vary, which is shown here through the outlines of Final Palaeolithic (15,000–11,000 cal BP) large tanged points from the type site of the so-called Bromme culture (Mathiassen, 1946). Panel a shows how within the framework of traditional typological thinking, the typological abstraction is thought of as a somehow idealised shared mental template, here represented by the median shape, which however has no actual empirical representative. Once defined, such idealised types act as reified stand-ins for the communities of practice. In contrast, panel b shows how in a materialist approach further variation is considered to be introduced over generations (g) into the total sample of artefacts (Eerkens and Lipo, 2007), which can subsequently be selected by cultural and natural factors. Here, large samples of artefacts, together with chronological and spatial data facilitate inferences about transmission processes and hence about changing population dynamics
