Proceedings of the British Academy

Ever since Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws and theories seem to evolve through variation, selection and replication. These essays consider whether this comparison is just a metaphor.

This important collection of essays presents the first survey in English of the archaeological and historical evidence for the development of urbanism in Iberia - evidence crucial for our understanding of the origin of ancient towns in Europe. The Iberian peninsula is a region of great potential for archaeological study, because of its key geographical position in south-western Europe and its rich and varied cultural background. These papers, by leading European scholars in the field, combine broad period-based syntheses of modern scholarship with specific examples from recent work at major sites. The volume contains Spanish summaries of all the papers.

The fourteen contributions testify to the increasing co-operation which is bringing together biologists, primatologists, archaeologists, psychologists, linguists and anthropologists who share a common interest in the study of social and cultural behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. The papers, derived from a Royal Society/British Academy meeting, range in topic from cultural and social behaviour among non-human primates, through the interaction of cognitive development with social organization during the Upper Palaeolithic, to behaviour (including linguistic behaviour) among modern humans. This volume reflects the important recent developments in such areas as behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and the origin and function of language.