The author evaluates predictions from the standard model of intensification of food production and suggests it be rejected based on an analysis of 40 societies. The standard model proposes that food producers will increase their energy input until the maximum possible output is achieved, at which point output and labor productivity will fall and producers will invent or adopt new technologies. He then proposes a different model, which he terms the cultural niche construction model. The cultural niche construction model proposes that societies will minimize their energy input while maximizing their returns through continual technological adaptation and niche construction. After predictions from this second model are tested, the author suggests tentatively accepting the cultural niche construction model as a new framework to explain transitions to complex societies.

Using both archaeological data from the Mesa Verde region and a Human Relations Area Files random sample of 25 worldwide societies, and another 10 from the American Southwest, the author looked to examine the relationship between changes in community size and settlements, agriculture intensification, and rules governing resource access. In particular the researcher wanted to examine the size of the group that controls the primary access to the main resource. After studying this global sample, the author takes an ethnographic look specifically at the Northern Anasazi in southewestern Colorado.

This study takes an economic approach in examining the practice of human sacrifice as it relates to notions of the economic value of human life. Codes are included.

Regional and worldwide distributions of several cultural characteristics are presented. Relationships between different cultural variables accounting for regional variation are also discussed. Results show that regional variations are found in most cultural traits.

This article reviews literature on social evolution, urbanization, and their interrelationships before empirically examining the relationship between settlement size and organizational complexity. An index of social development composed of three indicators is introduced, critiqued, and compared to other classification systems.

Drawing from cultural evolution theory, the authors develop a model to explain the origin and evolution of productive organizations (organizations specialized in producing goods and services to satisfy human needs). They propose that productive organizations have two characteristics: exclusive membership and enhanced social learning within the organization. They find their predictions supported in a global sample of premodern societies.

This article takes a materialist approach to the evolution of ideology in human culture.This article examines the possible coevolution of sociocultural subsystems. The author emphasizes ideological variables and their relationship to technological and social-structural subsystems. Analysis supports a process of coevolution, which the author suggests refutes broad claims of cultural particularism.

In this article, the authors reconsider the polygyny threshold model in order to account for the "polygyny paradox." This paradox, as the authors define it, is the trend away from polygyny as societies adopt stratified agricultural economies. This is despite an increase in both the importance of material wealth and greater leaves of wealth inequality both of which would otherwise suggest increased polygyny. The authors develop a new model that does account for this paradox.

Carneiro presents work on the evolutionary sequences of cultures. He concludes that human societies have evolved in a direction towards increased complexity. He also discovers a specific sequence of cultural traits that societies have largely followed.

This article presents a model of cultural evolution simulating the accumulation of tools in specialized and non-specialized populations under different demographic and environmental scenarios. The model predicts that the relationship between population size and repertoire size is nonlinear and can differ between non-specialized and specialized populations. For small population sizes, the non-specialized populations maintain knowledge better and therefore reach higher average repertoire sizes. In large populations, specialized populations can reach higher average repertoire sizes. This is because non-specialized population's total repertoire size is limited by the capacity of individuals to accumulate knowledge of different skills, while in specialized populations, each individual needs to know only a fraction of the population's repertoire. However, the model also predicts that specialized populations are more susceptible to information loss due to their subdivision of knowledge, and this can be amplified by demographic and environmental factors. The authors also use ethnographic data to analyze the relationship between population size and degree of craft specialization of societies, and how this may be influenced by ecological factors.