Cladistics is useful for reconstructing archaeological phylogenies: Palaeoindian points from the Southeastern United States

Cladistics, a method used to create a nested series of taxa based on homologous characters shared only by two or more taxa and their immediate common ancestor, offers a means of reconstructing artifact lineages that reflect heritable continuity as opposed to simple historical continuity. Although cladistically derived trees are only hypotheses about phylogeny, they are superior both to trees created through phenetics, which employs characters without regard as to whether they are analogous or homologus, and to trees created by using undifferentiated homologous characters. To date, cladistics is an unused approach to constructing archaeological phylogenies but one that holds considerable potential for resolving some of archaeology's historical problems. For example, it has long been noted that the southeastern united states exhibits the greatest diversity in fluted-point forms in North America--an observation that prompted Mason (1962) to propose that fluted points originated in the Southeast and then spread to other areas. However, because of a paucity of such points from well-dated contexts in the Southeast, it is difficult to ascertain chronological, let alone phylogenetic, relations among the various forms. Evolutionary trees derived from cladistical analysis are testable hypotheses about those phylogenetic relations.