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This introductory chapter outlines the general aims of the book, contextualizes its general approach within older streams of research, and identifies the key debates and questions it will address. It starts from first principles, by examining the unique nature of human social learning and the ways in which it underpins the maintenance of cumulative cultural traditions. It then examines how cultural-transmission theory-which draws broad analogies between processes of cultural and genetic inheritance-can now be applied to empirical research, providing a general framework of descent with modification for understanding the factors that structure the social propagation of material-culture traditions. The book generates insights that link back into long-standing anthropological and archaeological debates about the primary causes of local variability and long-term change in human technological traditions.

This chapter provides a theoretical and empirical framework for evaluating the roles of biological and cultural inheritance in the transmission of human social and political behavior. It introduces the methods by which parental transmission occurs and specifically addresses kinship designs and applications that illustrate the principal patterns of inheritance for socially significant outcomes. It considers the importance of mate selection for the transmission of social and genetic information and addresses this critical aspect of nonenvironmental transmission. It also discusses the fundamental domains on which spouses choose one another.

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the Roman Empire that produced a totally different outcome. Rome annexed lands that previously lay outside of its own cultural inheritance. Ethnic and cultural differences thus remained under the rule of Rome. The sense of exchange among equal, individual parts that had emerged in China after unification never came into being in Rome. Asclepiades and his followers saw the model image in the basic structures of the Roman Empire and they projected it onto their image of the healthy and sick body. It was the political and economic reality, not the expressive power of the human organism that was the impulse for their thoughts. Themison of Laodicea and others founded the school of the Methodists. They now dominated therapeutics theory and possessed two further advantages. One of the advantages was that the doctrine was simple. Asclepiades was not interested in hidden causes and he wanted nothing to do with anatomy. He was completely opposed to the interpretation of life processes. Another was that the therapy was congenial and convincing.

This final chapter undertakes crosscultural integration of the insights derived from each the three case studies, paving the way for a critical reflection on the main themes of propagation, coherence, and historical congruence in material-culture traditions. The chapter also makes a broader case for the utility of the book's descent-with-modification approach to the study of human technological traditions, highlighting productive overlaps with many other streams of archaeological and anthropological research, and identifying new themes and questions requiring further interdisciplinary investigation. The book's main conclusion is that a renewed focus on cultural inheritance promises fresh ways of exploring the complex array of factors that generate the endless richness of human cultural diversity in the past and also in the present. Understanding and explaining this cultural diversity has remained the unifying goal of archaeology and anthropology since the earliest inception of these two closely related disciplines.

Chapter 8 focuses on Jones’s presentation of cultural decline. While he explored this issue across all of his works, his approach to the possibility of renewal is demonstrated most explicitly in the painted inscriptions which unite diverse fragments of ancient literature into new visual forms. Examining Jones’s inscriptional practice provides a way in to his vision of cultural inheritance and the process by which he believed that Rome had passed on the classical and spiritual heritage to the modern world. This chapter contextualises Jones’s developing understanding of cultural dynamics through focusing on the dialogues he maintained with three of his friends: Christopher Dawson, Jackson Knight, and T. S. Eliot. Jones’s engagement with their visions of Rome—in particular their arguments for the inclusive power of Catholicism and for the importance of Virgil in the Western tradition—is examined through close readings of his inscriptions alongside evidence drawn from archival letters, essays, and marginalia.

Chapter 12 explores Jones’s visualisation of cultural heritage as a Bridge between past and present and his belief that Welsh culture held an integral position in British and Western tradition. This chapter traces the ways in which Jones embedded this concept of cultural inheritance into his artistic works—including The Lord of Venedotia (1948) and CARA WALLIA DERELICTA (1959)—and established it as a structural principle in his poetry, for example in The Sleeping Lord (1974). It interrogates Jones’s attempt to foreground the unique nature of the relationship between Rome and Wales so as to justify the continuance of Welsh culture in modernity before turning to a discussion of the crucial role he allotted to poets in a period of decline. In this construction, Jones felt it was his duty to preserve and rejuvenate Welsh heritage for the benefit of all the inhabitants of Britain and all who share in the Western cultural tradition.

The theory of natural pedagogy suggests that human infants genetically inherit a package of psychological adaptations that make them receptive to teaching. This chapter evaluates the theory of natural pedagogy, and makes it a test case for two recent theories of human nature: the nomological account and causal essentialism. However, neither of these theories captures firmly the explanatory project of which natural pedagogy is part. Instead, I offer a hybrid of the nomological account and causal essentialism, ‘evolutionary causal essentialism’. This captures both the evolutionary and the causal–explanatory characteristics of contemporary evolutionary psychology, broadly construed, and allows that natural pedagogy could be part of human nature even if, as this chapter argues, receptivity to teaching is culturally inherited.

This chapter describes how state leaders encounter five difficulties while crafting strategies for governing. The first is conflict between the goals identified in Chapter 5. A familiar conflict of goals is that between internal order and human rights. Another conflict among goals arises between external security and internal order. Moreover, the desire to promote economic growth may collide with several other goals, such as national security, internal order, and human rights. A second challenge in crafting governance strategies is uncertainty about the techniques to use to achieve goals. Even when leaders are clear about their priorities, they may be unsure about the most effective ways to pursue them. A third challenge in crafting governance strategies is managing cultural and institutional inheritances, while the fourth challenge derives from turbulence in the governing environment. Some aspects of the environment may remain relatively constant, but other aspects change quickly. This can throw a leader's calculations into disarray. The final challenge is analytic complexity—that is, the difficulty of absorbing knowledge and making judgments about large and complicated questions.

An active interest in the humanities was the culmination of and reward for successful nation-building. The goal toward which the entire nation strove, therefore, was a state of tranquility in which immediate needs had been met, internal opposition calmed, and external threats held at bay—a society whose citizens might explore at leisure the record of the past, seek fulfillment on their own terms, and enjoy in a disinterested spirit the pleasures of the arts. A society comprising individuals who both value their own lives and have the capacity to value the lives of others will in all probability be more creative, dynamic, and responsible than a society of managers, technicians, and engineers, as valuable as those professions are. It is in the humanities classroom that students are inspired, that the emotions as well as the rational intellect are engaged, that abstract values are shown being tested in action; and it is in the historical and literary texts studied in the humanities that students encounter instructive images of mastery and wisdom. The humanities sustain this second conception of individuality, as deeply rooted as the other in cultural inheritance.

Humans are a fundamentally social species, unable to reproduce and survive to reproductive age without a group. Groups are a deeply entrenched and significant interface between individuals and habitats. This chapter describes a model for the evolution of dynamic hierarchical structure in face-to-face groups. It posits four core configurations, repeatedly assembled in human evolution as well in intergenerational development. Core configurations are based on the conjunction of bodily form, subgroup size and persistent basic tasks. The overarching hypothesis of the model is that core configurations reciprocally scaffold the evolution, modern extension, and development of human mental systems which are materialized in the interrelations of bodily form, persistent tasks, and the ecology and culture of evolving humans. The overall selective advantage of evolution for sociality is the coordination of activity and the acquisition, reproduction, maintenance and innovation of resources, including information, knowledge, and practices within and between generations.

This chapter argues that there remained a strong British cultural inheritance within American society despite the fact that the United States had won its political independence from Great Britain. This cultural heritage was especially visible in the U.S. Navy, which consciously modeled itself after the Royal Navy. American officers read books and journals written by British naval experts, and they observed the British fleet in action. Prior to the War of 1812, it was fairly common for American and British officers to socialize and discuss professional subjects during their encounters at sea or at various ports of call. American naval education derived from the British system. In the Royal Navy, the most frequent path to an officer's commission was to begin one's career by direct appointment to a ship as a captain's servant. A smaller number of Royal Navy officers started by enlisting as seamen or joining the merchant marine.