Phylogenetics and material cultural evolution

Cultural artefacts, like genes and languages, reflect their history. The methodology of inference of that history, however, has been a contentious question. Recent applications of biological phylogenetic methodology to infer historical patterns of material culture are often explicitly justified on the grounds that essentially similar processes underlie evolution in both biological and material cultural realms. Conventional phylogenetic techniques, while helpful in some cases, do not provide a general theoretical and operational framewok for reconstructing material cultural history. Critical analyses of the diversity patterns of two musical instruments, the stringed psaltery and the brasswind cornet, reveal paths of information transfer and the origins of innovation unique to the cultural context that are unlike those in biological systems.