Over the last 40 years or so, there has been an explosion of cultural evolution research in anthropology and archaeology. In each discipline, cultural evolutionists investigate how interactions between individuals translate into group level patterns, with the aim of explaining the diachronic dynamics and diversity of cultural traits. However, while much attention has been given to deterministic...

The varied islands of the Pacific provide an ideal natural experiment for studying the factors shaping human impact on the environment. Previous research into pre-European deforestation across the Pacific indicated a major effect of environment but did not account for cultural variation or control for dependencies in the data due to shared cultural ancestry and geographic proximity. The relativ...

In their ambitious Evolutionary Anthropology paper, Winterhalder and Smith review the history, theory, and methods of human behavioral ecology (HBE). In establishing how HBE differs from traditional approaches within sociocultural anthropology, they and others laud its hypothetical-deductive research method. Our aim is to critically examine how human behavioral ecologists conduct their research...

Analysis of a natural fertility agrarian society with a multi-variate model of population ecology isolates three distinct phases of population growth following settlement of a new habitat: (1) a sometimes lengthy copial phase of surplus food production and constant vital rates; (2) a brief transition phase in which food shortages rapidly cause increased mortality and lessened fertility; and (3)...

For an anthropologist like myself the work of H.T. Odum has great significance. For 40 years his research has explored the workings of open systems of all sorts found in nature, including the biosphere’s systems of humanity (Odum, 1971, 1983, 1996; Odum and Odum, 1976, 2001; Odum et al., 1998). There is perhaps no more interesting systemic relationship than that between people and nature, and b...

Introduction In anthropology, the primary goal is understanding the human condition, what makes humans human or explaining human variation and change. To critically assess what a given theory has to offer anthropological attempts to understand the human condition requires a detailed understanding of a theory and its components. For some it may seem that there is a contradiction between the goal...

This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, tosome of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology andgeography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy(commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrificatio...