**Author(s):** Miton, H; Morin, O. Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) may be subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness (e.g. to distinguish a mark from its nearest neighbors), and pressure for complexity (e.g. to be harder to fake). The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete due to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited datasets in fields like archaeology. In this preregistered study, we used a dataset of ~81,000 Kansas cattle brands (1990-2016) to explore two questions: (1) the relative influence of copying, distinctiveness, and complexity, and (2) the effects of time- and space- averaging on statistical signals. By conducting generative inference with an agent-based model, we found that the patterns in our data are consistent with random copying and pressure for intermediate complexity. In addition, by comparing mixed and structured datasets, we found that these statistical signals of random copying are robust to, and possibly boosted by, time- and space-averaging.

Distinctiveness, copying, and complexity in the cultural evolution of cattle brands

**Author(s):** Raymond C; Sánchez-Villagra MR; Rangel-de Lázaro G; Lynch, S; Ward S; Wilson LAB Intro: Intentional cranial modification (ICM), the application of materials to the cranium of infants to permanently alter the head shape, has a long history and is found throughout the world. We collated global records of ICM to trace the origin and dispersal of these practices. 
Methods: We collated published records for Central (n=271), South (n=53), and North America (n=54), the Caribbean (n=113), and Eurasia (n=252), recording geographic location (decimal coordinates), ICM type, biological sex, period, and date. The temporal sequence of ICM practice was assessed using spatiotemporal kernel density estimation in R with spatstat and sparr packages. 
Results: Our database comprised 743 records, spanning 40 countries across five regions. We found the highest incidence of ICM throughout the New World and identified clusters of diverse modification types and potential areas of missing data due to sampling bias in the archaeological record. 
Discussion: We present a global overview of potential areas and times of diffusion, and cultural convergence. There were probably multiple developments of CM, mirrored also in the different social contexts and modes in which CM has been recorded.

The temporal sequence and global spatial distribution of intentional cranial modification practices

 The terms “culture” and “cultural group” admit several readings. A prevalent one takes them to be sortals: terms that pick out countable entities. I’ll call such countable entities sortal cultures. Sortal cultural are frequently used in policy, jurisprudence, and empirical work. These are entities usually picked out with national or ethnic labels, like “the Basque” or “the Kwakwaka’waka”. Because they facilitate counting, sortals require two criteria: one for identifying the entities at stake (a criterion of application) and another that tracks their existence over time (a criterion of identity). 

Recently, philosophers have fleshed out these criteria by analogy to the phylogenetic account of species. Identifying similarities, these authors suggest sortal cultures should be underpinned by a similar metaphysical picture: relational essentialism. This, I’ll suggest, is sensible—but doesn’t fully specify the criteria needed. Further pursuing the analogy between species and culture puts pressure on current accounts, and suggests four possible routes forward: to (i) merely use the analogy instrumentally; (ii) adopt analogize a different species concept; (iii) abandon the idea that cultures are lineages, or; (iv) adopt a “rank-free” account of culture. I’ll close by highlighting the novelty—and plausibility—of (iv), that cultures should be understood as “rank-free” entities.

Cultural Lineages and Rank Freedom

Archaeological and anthropological research on war has linked the taking of human body parts as trophies with transitions to sedentism, farming, and political centralization: trophies could increase status of warriors in societies with achieved inequality, project political power for leaders relying on violent coercion of internal and external populations, and were often linked with beliefs about agricultural fertility. This study tests whether institutionalized trophy-taking in war was more likely in societies 1) at intermediate levels of social complexity, 2) engaging in violent political expansion, and 3) dependent on agriculture. A dataset of 113 societies was coded from ethnographic and secondary historical/archaeological sources. Bayesian logistic regressions were used to test the likelihood of trophy-taking from the predictors, using a DAG to adjust for appropriate covariates. None of the hypotheses was supported. There was some evidence for a negative effect of social complexity (95% CI largely negative across models). This could be interpreted as less display-oriented violence in complex societies reliant on more egalitarian/cooperative ideologies. It is also possible the sample or coding was biased, such as with the measurement of social complexity, or that trophy-taking is too broad a phenomenon to be consistently associated with any of the hypothesized drivers.

A cross-cultural analysis of social complexity and the taking of human body parts as trophies during war

**Author(s):** Sánchez-Villagra, M. R.; Bertazoni, C. Introduction: Archaeological records of dogs in the Americas extend to 10kbp. Domestic dogs (DD) are seemingly ubiquitous in the Andean region, whereas Amazonian Amerindians are claimed to have lacked domestic dogs until recent historical times. Ontological features of the latter have been claimed to explain this pattern. 
Materials/Methods: Published records from HRAF and those found from other standard search approaches were collected, thus allowing us to synthesize archaeological (burials, ceramics, osteological), ethnographic (myths) and historical (chronicles) data. 
Findings: Our database comprises circa 100 records. The temporal and geographic patterns of occurrence of DD among Amerindians reveal gaps of information reflecting sampling bias more than lack of them. Our documentation of myths across cultures shows that DD occupy different positions in pre-Columbian and colonial times, probably reflecting changes in human-dog relation. 
Discussion: The apparent Andean/Amazonian divide in the existence of DD in South America is perhaps reflective of prevalence of discipline efforts. Linguistic studies suggest at least some exchanges between Andes and Amazonia for some regions. The archaeological and ethnographic record of DD in the Caribbean suggest previous presence of them in at least some Amazonian regions given well supported hypotheses of human migrations in those areas.

Towards a cultural macroevolution of dog domestication in South America

**Author(s):** Matzig, DN; Warnock, R; Marwick, B; Riede, F The use of phylogenetic methods for the of study macroarchaeological processes of cultural evolution has long been advocated for, especially for the study of artefact shape. Due to technical limitations, the use of discrete character traits in these efforts prevails, which comes along with a non-trivial set of challenges. However, recent methodological advances in palaeobiology (Parins-Fukuchi 2017; Zhang, Drummond, and Mendes 2021) allow us now to infer Bayesian phylogenies using continuous characters. In this article, we present an exploratory analysis of cultural evolution in the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (~15.000-11.000 BP) using a time-scaled Bayesian phylogeny based on the outline shape of lithic tools obtained from legacy data via 2D outline based geometric morphometrics. We estimate the rates of diversification and trait evolution in artefact shape, and test whether the recovered patterns correlate with the climatic and environmental changes within this timeframe. While common in cultural evolutionary analyses of language, the extension of Bayesian phylogenetic methods to archaeology represents a major methodological breakthrough.

An analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool evolution using a Bayesian phylogenetic framework

Are you an archaeologist interested in publishing your work with AAA? Watch Elizabeth Chin, editor of the AAA's flagship journal American Anthropologist, and Charles Cobb, President of the AAA Archaeology Division, in a guided discussion on how to submit archaeology-themed manuscripts to American Anthropologist. 

The Art of Crafting Archaeology Contributions to American Anthropologist

SemEval is the primary venue in the NLP community for the proposal of new challenges and for the systematic empirical evaluation of NLP systems. This paper provides a systematic quantitative analysis of SemEval aiming to evidence the
patterns of the contributions behind SemEval. By understanding the distribution
of task types, metrics, architectures, participation and citations over time we aim to answer the question on what is being evaluated by SemEval.

What is SemEval evaluating? A Systematic Analysis of Evaluation Campaigns in NLP

In this paper, we introduce a new embedding-based metric relying on trainable ranking models to evaluate the semantic accuracy of neural data-to-text generators.
This metric is especially well suited to semantically and factually assess the performance of a text generator when tables can be associated with multiple references and table values contain textual utterances.
We first present how one can implement and further specialize the metric by training the underlying ranking models on a legal Data-to-Text dataset.
We show how it may provide a more robust evaluation than other evaluation schemes in challenging settings using a dataset comprising paraphrases between the table values and their respective references.
Finally, we evaluate its generalization capabilities on a well-known dataset, WebNLG, by comparing it with human evaluation and a metric recently introduced based on natural language inference.
We then illustrate how it naturally characterizes, both quantitatively and qualitatively, omissions and hallucinations.

Trainable Ranking Models to Evaluate the Semantic Accuracy of Data-to-Text Neural Generator

This presentation describes the UMD submission to the Explainable Quality Estimation Shared Task at the Eval4NLP 2021 Workshop on ``Evaluation & Comparison of NLP Systems''. We participated in the word-level and sentence-level MT Quality Estimation (QE) constrained tasks for all language pairs: Estonian-English, Romanian-English, German-Chinese, and Russian-German. Our approach combines the predictions of a word-level explainer model on top of a sentence-level QE model and a sequence labeler trained on synthetic data. These models are based on pre-trained multilingual language models and do not require any word-level annotations for training, making them well suited to zero-shot settings. Our best performing system improves over the best baseline across all metrics and language pairs, with an average gain of 0.1 in AUC, Average Precision, and Recall at Top-K score.

The UMD Submission to the Explainable MT Quality Estimation Shared Task: Combining Explanation Models with Sequence Labeling

Badenian (lower part of Middle Miocene) sediments are of paramount importance of defining the Central Paratethys in Serbia. The marine deposition in the Neogene of Serbia is limited to the Badenian age. The locality is situated on the easternmost slopes of Fruška Gora Mt., occupying the Koševac ridge. Badenian sediments are confirmed to date in this area at an outcrop along the road leading from Krčedin village to the Krčedin quarry. Coordinates of the outcrop are 45°10'5"N 20°8'15"E. The whole outcrop is not higher than 2m and contains four lithofacies, which is an excellent object for high resolution sequence stratigraphy. These sediements are part of a syn-rift climax system tract, according to the sequence stratigraphic scheme devised by Prosser (1993) and improved by Holz et al. (2017) to fit the rift tectonostratigraphic model. The basin basement is represented by Lower Cretaceous turbidites exposed at the Krčedin quarry, and the rift strata are overlain by Quaternary sediments (Anđelković, 2020). Prosser (1993) defined the syn-rift sediments as belonging to the rift initiation or rift climax system tracts. So can we describe the found Badenian sediments. The lowest part of the series is represented by coarse-grained conglomerates belonging to the lithofacies A. It can be defined as rift initiation system tract because it represents the transgressive surface, probably bounded by the syn-rift unconformity (sensu Holz et al., 2017) at its base. Lithofacies B is represented by microconglomerates, which indicates less water energy and slightly more depth, so it would be convenient to assign it to the early rift climax system tract. Finally, lithofacies C (sandy marl) and lithofacies D (pure marl) can be found. They containt numerous planktonic foraminifera (Orbulina suturalis, Praeorbulina sp., Globigerina sp.), a much lesser amount of benthic foraminifera (Borelis melo, Elphidium sp.) and some ostracoda and gastropod fragments (Anđelković & Batoćanin, 2020). These marls are remnants of a rapidly deepening basin and they can be described as middle rift climax system tract. After the Badenian age, the basin was rapidly inverted.

High resolution rift sequence stratigraphy of Badenian sediments near Krčedin (Northern Serbia, Central Paratethys)

The Apuan-Versilia plain (northwestern Tuscany) is a dynamic territory subject to continuous environmental evolution and characterized by a widespread archaeological heritage of considerable importance (Bini et al., 2013). In Versilia, tourism is mainly seaside with a concentrated flow in the summer with overcrowding problems (Marchi et al., 2021). However, the cultural and environmental visitor centers located in the immediate hinterland are still poorly known. The study of the environmental evolution (from prehistoric times to today, up to possible future scenarios) could be used as vector to enhance the cultural heritage of the Versilia area as a whole. This work wolud like to identify past palaegeographic scenarios by integrating data from different sources (archaeological, historical, cartographic, geological, environmental) into the GIS environment. These paleogeographic maps can be used to connect the various archeological and geological sites located throughout the territory and therefore increase their visibility and importance. This could increase of visits in cultural sites could be help on the sensibilization of the visiting and the citizens on the themes of the cultural heritage and climate change. In fact, the effects of climate change, including global warming and sea level rise, are particularly relevant for coastal areas (IPCC, 2018), such us the study area, where climate chanhge threat cultural and environmental heritage.

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Distinctiveness, copying, and complexity in the cultural evolution of cattle brands

The temporal sequence and global spatial distribution of intentional cranial modification practices

Cultural Lineages and Rank Freedom

A cross-cultural analysis of social complexity and the taking of human body parts as trophies during war

Towards a cultural macroevolution of dog domestication in South America

An analysis of European Late Upper Palaeolithic stone tool evolution using a Bayesian phylogenetic framework

The Art of Crafting Archaeology Contributions to American Anthropologist

What is SemEval evaluating? A Systematic Analysis of Evaluation Campaigns in NLP

Trainable Ranking Models to Evaluate the Semantic Accuracy of Data-to-Text Neural Generator

The UMD Submission to the Explainable MT Quality Estimation Shared Task: Combining Explanation Models with Sequence Labeling

High resolution rift sequence stratigraphy of Badenian sediments near Krčedin (Northern Serbia, Central Paratethys)

The use of paleogeographic reconstructions as a vector to increase the visibility of archaeological and geological heritage

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