Drennan - Cultural Evolution, Human Ecology and Empirical Research

CHAPTER 3 Cultural Evolution, Human Ecology, and Empirical Research ROBERT D. DRENNAN

For the past 20 years or so, the combination of human ecology and cultural evolution has been by far the most productive theoretical force in empirical research on long-term sociocultural change, at least in the New World tropics. This is partly because cultural evolution has always been concerned primarily with the kind of far-reaching, long-term changes on which archeology, more than any other discipline, is and must be focused. Far more than any other approach, cultural evolution has stimulated and guided the archeological research on which our knowledge of long sequences of change is based.

Although it should, perhaps, be superfluous in a volume dedicated to cultural evolution, I suspect it is necessary to make clear what I mean by the term. The number of different meanings attached to "cultural evolution" by different scholars and the diverse connotations that the phrase has collected (increasingly pejorative in recent years it seems) have made me somewhat reluctant to use it. Discussion at the sympo-sium from which this volume grew made it clear that, even in such a group of scholars as this, we do not all mean the same thing, sometimes not even nearly the same thing, when we say "cultural evolution."

I use the term "cultural evolution" to refer to the tradition that comes to us principally through White (1949, 1959), Steward (1955), Service (1962, 1971, 1975), and Sahlins and Service (1960) with all their as-sorted contradictions, and I include the subsequent proliferation of often contrasting approaches from numerous scholars (cf. Alland 1970; Durham 1976, 1982; Dunnell 1980; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981). I should emphasize that some of these more recent authors, whom I include under the cultural evolutionary rubric, have themselves rejected it, seeing what they do as a reaction against cultural evolution. To identify cultural evolution with the writings, say, of Elman Service, however, and to insist on 100 percent agreement with these precepts as

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a condition of membership is to take an excessively narrow view of what a school of thought is. For me the essence of cultural evolution is not directionality of change through a prescribed set of stages but the way processes of change are modeled. These processes, in a cultural evolu-tionary model, must include mechanisms to generate variability and mechanisms to select from among that variability the patterns that are perpetuated. In discussions of cultural evolution (in the New World tropics and elsewhere), the common shorthand for this has been to show why certain patterns of organization are successful solutions to particu-lar problems that arise in given (usually environmental) circumstances.

The empirical research that cultural evolution, especially in combina-tion with ecological approaches, has stimulated in the New World trop-ics has focused very heavily on the development of complex societies. Whatever anyone may now think of the validity or utility of the "chiefdom" and "state" stages, these concepts as formulated and popu-larized by Elman Service have forcefully directed our attention to impor-tant social facts available from previously little-noticed aspects of the archeological record. We have seen the elaboration of models that attri-bute the development of complex societies in one way or another to the growth of population, to specialized production and exchange, to par-ticular agricultural technologies or ways of organizing agricultural pro-duction, and to several other factors acting singly or in combination. The theoretical debate about which of these factors was of prime impor-tance has focused an enormous amount of methodologically innovative archeological research on relevant topics. The result has been a rapid expansion of our knowledge of these aspects of developing complex societies in the New World tropics. This expansion is attributable in very large measure to the stimulating and focusing effect of cultural evolutionary and ecological approaches to the study of long-term social change. Whatever criticisms of cultural evolution may be voiced, they cannot include the charge that it has been either difficult to operational-ize or unproductive in stimulating empirical research.

This is not to say that we have now arrived at all the information we need about complex societies in the New World tropics to thoroughly evaluate these contending models within the realm of cultural evolution. There continues to be vigorous debate around these subjects, and there continues to be no shortage of potentially highly productive research

left by a very lopsided focus on the earliest and most elaborate chiefdoms and on the largest and most complicated states. In this re-spect cultural evolution has heightened an already exaggerated empha-sis in archeological research on the first and the biggest. Only research on areas and periods where the development of social complexity came

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more slowly or not at all can complete the investigation of popular cultural evolutionary models. The development and application of new methodologies continue to offer exciting possibilities for expanding our fund of knowledge relevant to these models as well. In short, cultural evolutionary theory has provided us with a concrete and productive program for empirical research on sociocultural change, especially as concerns the origins of complex societies.

I perceive, however, a growing gulf between empirical research on the one hand and interesting models of long-term social and cultural change on the other. My thoughts on this subject are certainly influ-enced by the fact that much of this paper was written during the day-to-day throes of an archeological field project. It gives me pause to pass a single afternoon trying to write about processes of social change, trying to identify the peculiar pink mineral that appears as temper in a certain pottery type, and trying to turn a Land Rover right-side up again and make it run and steer. These, of course, are the usual occupational hazards of the archeologist. That the distance between theories of social change and collecting and analyzing primary archeological data is great is not news at this point. A more vexing disjuncture between empirical research and models of sociocultural change is the extent to which the models that have become something of a standard in guiding such re-search are no longer really the ones about which the most interesting and productive theoretical discussion revolves.

In what follows, I will discuss selective mechanisms for cultural be-havior in complex societies using data on the rise of chiefdoms in the Colombian Andes. I believe we must look explicitly at what the level of selection is, especially at how selection works on the group and the individual, or in biological and cultural reproduction.

MODELS OF CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES

We have a number of cultural evolutionary/ecological models of com-plex societies that conjure up a host of factors that seem related to varying degrees in different instances; among them are population growth, redistributive economies, specialized production, environ-mental diversity, and intensive agriculture. It has, by now, become almost a tradition that comparative studies of developing complex socie-ties discover that some of these factors are important in some cases and others are important in other cases. We routinely conclude such com-parative studies by saying that general statements about the processes by which complex societies develop will not take the form of finally resolving the question of which factor or combination of factors was


really responsible, but rather that we must forge through to some differ-ent level of discourse to make useful, general statements about pro-cesses.

It has been almost 15 years since Flannery (1972) issued such a call, relegating these much-discussed factors to the lowest of his three hierar-chical levels of generalitythe "socio-environmental stresses." Progres-sively more general statements were about "mechanisms" and "pro-cesses." Although this paper is cited approvingly and regularly, it is still the norm that grant proposals for field research focus on investiga-tion of factors such as the ones listed earlier, without firm connection to more general models. Flannery's suggestions about mechanisms and processes have not really been operationalized in empirical research strategies. In a much more recent attempt to summarize and compare empirical research on the origins of complex societies, Wright (1986:358) notes that we have a number of interesting ideas but "no way of expressing the principles we dimly perceive, nor of deducing testable consequences from such expressions."

Such a view, espoused even by proponents of cultural evolutionary approaches (by my broad definition at least), has naturally led to wide-spread attacks on cultural evolution. Those that label cultural evolution as pass (as if scholarly approaches came in and out of style like other Paris fashions) merit no serious attention. Others offer directions even less conducive to the rigorous empirical testing without which analysis of sociocultural change is reduced to word games.

Despite a certain grasping for something that seems to remain just out of reach, it is still the tradition of cultural evolution that offers the greatest promise for building toward more successful models of general principles in such a way as to make those principles subject to empiri-cal tests. Those who pursue cultural evolutionary directions have the substantial advantage of being able to build directly on the quite consid-erable accomplishments of the research thus far spawned by such ap-proaches. Discussion of general models of cultural evolution continues to be vigorous, to say the least, although much of it leads in directions that have been difficult to operationalize in the arena of empirical re-search. I concentrate here on one aspect of this discussion that has rather direct and as yet undeveloped implications for empirical re-search.

EVOLUTION VERSUS ECOLOGY?

Cultural evolutionary studies of complex societies in the New World tropics, as I previously noted, have been inextricably bound to ecologi-


cal approaches, and this has been a major aspect of their stimulating effect on empirical research. In biology the relationship between eco-logical and evolutionary studies has never been so close. Indeed, there has often been considerable tension between ecological and evolution-ary approaches. Dunnell (1980), among others, has argued that evolu-tionary explanations and ecological-functional explanations are of a fun-damentally different and incompatible logical sort, and thus that cul-tural evolution has never proposed truly evolutionary explanations at all, only ecological-functional ones. Since this issue is at the heart of the principles of processes and selective mechanisms I want to discuss, it is important to show why this distinction between evolutionary expla-nations and ecological-functional explanations is neither valid nor use-ful.

We all know that it is difficult to consider the myriad functional interrelationships of the elements in a large system and simultaneously to consider the mechanisms by which such a system changes and devel-ops. This difficulty, however, should not be taken for a fundamental incompatibility. Indeed, if there is some fundamental incompatibility between these two modes of explanation, as Dunnell (1980) and others have argued, then the logic of both modes of explanation collapses. Let's consider just the realm of biology at the moment. Evolutionary explanations are in their very essence functional. To understand selec-tion for a particular characteristic, one shows how it functions ultimately to enhance reproduction. This functional explanation serves because it is clearly coupled to the selective mechanisms of evolutionary theory. This set of mechanisms makes it necessary that those characteristics, from the available choices, that most enhance reproduction become increasingly common in a population. (I am aware that this is the barest skeleton of the logic of evolutionary explanation and that I have ignored a large body of important qualifications and current debates. I do this intentionally for brevity and clarity because the debates I am ignoring concern the extent of the applicability of such explanations but not their basic structure.) The point, in short, is that evolutionary explanations are functional in nature.

It remains difficult to discuss evolutionary (selective) mechanisms and functions at the same timethat is, really to effectively combine the modeling of function and selectionbut not because of any underly-ing logical contradiction. The difficulty is of the same sort that an architect has in designing a building whose exterior presents a pleasing form and appearance at the same time that the interior provides a practi-cal and esthetically satisfying arrangement of rooms. In biology, both frontiers have been avidly and productively pursued. Both ecologists and evolutionary biologists thrive, and both fields have substantial ac-


complishments to which their practitioners can point with pride, even if examples of the successful integration of the two complementary ap-proaches are rare.

In the realm of culture and society, however, the situation is less balanced. Although I cannot accept Bunnell's (1980) argument about the logical incompatibility of evolutionary and ecological explanations, I do share his observation that the major accomplishments of the cul-tural evolutionary school emphasize the ecological-functional side of things rather than the evolutionary one, properly speaking. Clearly the main current of cultural evolutionary studies has been, and largely con-tinues to be, delineation of the functioning of ecosystems, broadly con-strued to include much human behavior that many other social scientists consider unrelated to ecology. Explicit discussion of actual mechanisms of change, though not altogether absent, lags far behind.

Given the traditional stress on smoothly functioning ecosystems and, in general, on successful adjustment of culture to environment (the term "adaptation" is often used), one is compelled to assume that, underlying cultural evolution, there are some (generally unspecified) mechanisms assuring the perpetuation of ecologically successful patterns of behavior at the expense of ecologically less successful ones. Unless one makes such an assumption, then the notions of adaptation and the descriptions of smoothly functioning ecosystems that have been the stock in trade of cultural evolution offer us no understanding at all, because there would be no reason to suppose that things would work out that way except by purest coincidence.

Mechanisms of change, and especially of selection, have long been discussed, particularly by those concerned with elucidating and clarify-ing the nature of the "analogy" between cultural evolution and biologi-cal evolution (cf. Gerard et al. 1956; Meggers 1959; Campbell 1970; Alland 1972). These discussions, however, have been characterized by a remarkable sterility so far as applications are concerned. Although various scholars have advanced conflicting formulations at this level, empirical research directed at resolving these disagreements is con-spicuous principally by its absence. The White-Steward-Service tradi-tion, by contrast, is very present in the bibliographies of numerous studies of long-term social and cultural change and has been especially influential in archeological studies of complex societies in the New World tropics. The cultural evolutionary theory that has most influenced and guided the archeology of New World complex societies, though, has left a gap where we ought to find explicit discussion of processes of change.

The stress on smoothly functioning ecosystems and the frequent use of terms like "adaptation" and "selection," together with the natural


emphasis on the organization of the behavior of often very large groups of people, invite one to fill this gap in evolutionary thought along the following lines (at least in the case of explanations of emerging social complexity). Particular environmental circumstances, be they diversity of resources, population growth, advantages of cooperative intensive agriculture, or others, "select for" certain patterns of complex social organization because groups of people that are so organized (however that might have come to pass) are more successful (in the most funda-mental sense, at feeding themselves) and thus expand at the expense of groups not so organized. It has often been pointed out that, unlike non-human species, human groups can be replaced by other human groups either as their members die off or as their members choose to join other (and therefore more successful) groups. These selective mechanisms of change are usually not spelled out, but the majority of the cultural evolutionary models that have been such a major spur to research on New World complex societies are most easily understood if supplied with such an account of the processes by which the changes actually take place.

An example of explicit discussion of just such processes of group replacement is Carneiro's (1970) theory of state origins. Carneiro casts the "voluntarism" he sees in other cultural evolutionary models of state origins in an unfavorable light, portraying models emphasizing, for ex-ample, specialized production in heterogeneous environments as depen-dent on a social contract between people who agree to set aside their differences for the greater economic good of complex organization. The general silence of many authors associated with such models (including Service [1975:7180]) on the subject of actual processes of change does invite the imputation of such "voluntarism" to them. Regardless of what the original authors of such models might have thought, the more impor-tant point here is that they can just as easily be supplied with a set of processes involving the replacement of one group by another in hostile competition (the kind of "coercive" process Carneiro prefers) as with a set of processes involving the success of a group through voluntary recruitment of members who choose to join because they recognize the benefits of membership. In either case, the essential feature of the processes of change envisioned is that a group organized to solve more successfully the problems presented by its environment progressively

labeled as such or not, both "coercive" and "voluntaristic" processes hinge on the process of selection.

Such processes are, of course, well known in biology under the head-ing of group selection. These models, often associated with V. C. Wynne-Edwards (1962), were very popular in biology during the 1960s,


but since the 1970s they have come under increasingly critical examina-tion. In particular, selection for altruistic behavior that benefits a group but is detrimental to the altruistic individual is difficult to understand. While the advantage to a group of having altruistic individuals is clear, within the group altruistic individuals should be steadily losing out to their more selfish competitors. Thus, whatever the advantages to the group of possessing altruistic individuals, it should be very difficult for such a group to come into existence or to perpetuate altruism within it. It seems that the conditions permitting group selection to be a major force are rare, at least among non-human species, and the notion of inclusive fitness enables many superficially paradoxical characteristics or behaviors (such as altruism) to be understood in terms of selection operating at the level of the individual (cf. Williams 1966, 1971; Ha-milton 1971; Trivers 1971; Dawkins 1976).

The ferment that this reorganization of evolutionary thinking in biol-ogy represents has, of course, spilled over into the realm of cultural evolution as well, touching off a new round of theoretical attention to mechanisms of change. This round is thoroughly evolutionary in even the strictest sense, since the focus is explicitly on selective mecha-nisms, their nature, the units of selection, and the level at which they operate in cultural evolution. Most important, these issues pose ques-tions about the nature of sociocultural change that have implications relevant to empirical research. That is, they involve empirically testable propositions and offer an opportunity to refocus studies of sociocultural change toward the more general issues whose slippery nature we have grown accustomed to lamenting (as discussed previously).

SELECTION IN CULTURAL EVOLUTION

If we are to continue to model long-term social change in selective terms, as cultural evolutionists explicitly or implicitly have been doing for some time, then we are faced with some major choices about the nature of those selective processes. Archeological study of long-term sequences of sociocultural change, especially those involving complex societies, can provide vital information for evaluating the alternatives. I am going to pose three major alternative approaches to these issues,

The first of these is the notion that the concept of inclusive fitness so broadens the ability of evolutionary biology to deal with social behavior that much of what has traditionally been regarded as outside the realm of biology can now be understood simply in terms of biological evolution as conferring sufficient reproductive advantage to an individual and his


kin that no further explanation is necessary (cf. Chagnon and Irons 1979). The level of selection is the individual, and calculation of the selective advantage his behavior confers includes not only benefit to himself but to his relatives as well, since they share some proportion of his genes. The prevalence of kinship as a principle of human social organization, in relatively simple societies at least, has given much encouragement to advocates of this approach. Such a direction, of course, represents sociobiology on the half-shell: raw and unadulter-ated.

The second approach is one that seeks to model cultural evolution as a precise analogy to biological evolution, operating in parallel but sepa-rate fashion (cf. Dawkins 1976; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Lum-sden and Wilson 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985). This is a more direct outgrowth of the cultural evolutionary tradition in anthropology, but it has received a considerable invigoration from developments in evolutionary biology during the last decade or so. The basic idea, in one form or another, is to model human societies as resulting from a cultural code consisting of a very large number of individual instructions that (like genes) can be more or less successful at replicating themselves. Here the level of selection is the individual or perhaps even the cultural trait. The approach certainly contains much sociobiology, but it is well cooked and often served in a thick cream sauce.

The third approach seeks to perpetuate the emphasis on group selec-tion largely implicit in the White-Steward-Service tradition of cultural evolution (cf. Alexander 1974:376-377; Dunnell 1980:65-66). Here a parallel but separate realm of cultural evolution is joined by a set of conditions showing why the reservations concerning group selection that seem so convincing for non-human species do not apply to humans or especially not to complex human societies. As specified by Dunnell (1980:6566), the conditions, given cultural transmission of traits sepa-rate from genetic transmission of traits, are (1) a fast rate of change; (2) a group that is "a functionally interdependent unit rather than an . . . aggregate of redundant functional units"; and (3) a cultural system so complicated that no one individual possesses enough knowledge to pass it on alone. This approach is for those who have tasted sociobiology but decline to partake, at least insofar as complex human societies are concerned.

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON LEVELS OF SELECTION

The distance from formulating these alternative approaches to deline-ating empirical research questions whose answers can contribute to re-


solving conflicts between them is not very great. Taking up the contrast between the second and third approaches leads us directly to the topic to which archeologists under the influence of cultural evolution have already dedicated so much attention: the emergence of complex socie-ties. If the third approach is correct, then the emergence of complex societies heralds a significant shift in the level on which the selective processes of cultural evolution focus. We ought to be able to find ar-cheological evidence of such a shift in level if it exists and to say something about when, in any particular sequence of sociocultural change, the conditions underlying such a shift developed.

Certainly the necessary conditions specified by Dunnell (fast rate of change, functionally interdependent groups, and very complicated cul-tural systems) are implicit if not explicit in any conception of complex society.

As noted earlier, Carneiro (1970), for one, has argued that the mechanisms of state emergence are exactly those of group selection: In a situation of competition between a number of groups over scarce agri-cultural resources, the group with the most effective military organiza-tion wins out at the expense of the others, either obliterating or incorpo-rating them. Sanders (1972) has seen a similar dynamic operating, for example, in the Basin of Mexico during the period of the formation of the Teotihuacan state. In the nearby and roughly contemporaneous case of the Valley of Oaxaca, it is much more difficult to see empirical evidence of a process of competition between groups that results in the emergence of the Monte Alban state. The debate (Sanders and Santley 1978; Santley 1980; Blanton 1980; Kowalewski 1980) over whether there is evidence of such a dynamic of change in the Oaxaca sequence is perhaps more directly relevant to fundamental questions of the pro-cesses of cultural evolution than is at first obvious.

As prehistoric states get large, however, it is more difficult to see how the replacement of one group by another more successfully organized group can provide the major mechanism by which change takes place. To continue with the cases of Teotihuacan and Monte Alban, for exam-ple, each sequence provides something on the order of a millennium of sociocultural change after the respective capitals had bested whatever serious rivals they might have had in their immediate regions and be-yond. Each seems to have dominated a larger and larger territory and population (at least for a few centuries), and in the process both seem to have undergone several substantial changes in organization. But these changes clearly did not come about as either capital was eclipsed, destroyed, or incorporated by some other polity. While group selection approaches may be applied to the initial emergence of these two states, their application to the significant sequences of change following initial


emergence is not nearly so straightforward. If these changes came about by the kind of group selection envisioned by the third of the evolution-ary approaches previously outlined, then the groups involved must be envisioned as existing and competing with each other within their re-spective polities rather than as external competing polities. Attempting to apply group selection models in this way, and especially finding the empirical evidence necessary to support such an application will, how-ever, be very difficult.

A more direct route to empirical evidence relevant to this issue is to concentrate on that great cultural evolutionary grab-bag: the chiefdom. Superficially, at least, the conventional wisdom about chiefdoms offers us considerable encouragement to think in terms of group selection. Dunnell's three conditions for making selection at the group level impor-tant are fulfilled. Social change comes fast: chiefdoms are often noted for their lack of stable patterns of organization. At least the larger and more complicated examples form functionally interdependent groups with cultural systems too complicated to be fully mastered by a single individual. And yet chiefdoms would seem to be large enough that the competition between groups would be played out primarily at the inter-societal level rather than between groups within a single society, mak-ing it easier to find archeological evidence of the relevant groups and their competition.

An area like the Colombian Andes provides an ideal setting in which to explore this aspect of the processes of cultural evolution. There is a sequence of at least two thousand years involving societies roughly clas-sifiable as chiefdoms. Even though we customarily label the societies encountered here by the Spanish conquistadores as chiefdoms, the eth-nohistoric record suggests substantial variety in form of organization across the region. Although the archeological record of the Colombian Andes is only sketchily known, it tends to confirm this suggestion and extend it to chronological variety in form of organization as well. Per-haps the earliest chiefdoms of the Colombian Andes, those of the Alto Magdalena (the region of San Agustin), focused intensive public effort on the construction of elaborate tombs and related funerary monuments. Later societies include those of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, whose monumental public works centered conspicuously on residential terraces and road networks. The Muisca of the area around modern Bogota, known in some considerable ethnohistoric detail, left such a dearth of monumental remains that superficial examination of the ar-cheological record would provide little obvious evidence of complex patterns of organization at all. One's attention is automatically drawn, not to the monolithic question of the origin of the chiefdom, but rather to the nature of a much wider array of social and cultural changes


resulting in such variety. One is especially encouraged to seek evidence of the two different cultural evolutionary dynamics advanced in the second and third approaches contrasted previously.

If selection at the group level is the fundamental process of cultural evolutionary change (for complex societies at least), then the Colombian Andes should see repeated replacement of one society by another in the matrix of inter-chiefdom competition. Change in form of organization should come about as one society organized in a particular way expands at the expense of another, organized differently. If, on the other hand, cultural evolutionary change results from processes of selection operat-ing at a level more like that of the individual, then there is no reason to presuppose any correspondence between changes in form of organiza-tion and shifts in dominance by particular societies.

The kinds of empirical archeological evidence relevant to the pursuit of this contrast include both those leading to the reconstruction of forms of social, political, and economic organization as well as those pertain-ing to cultural identification. If the situation is one of competition be-tween different cultural groups marked by unique forms of social, politi-cal, and economic organization, then the differentiation of these spheres of human behavior and the delineation of their various patterns become of paramount importance. The sort of archeological work identified in recent years with cultural evolution and human ecology has specialized in the reconstruction of social, political, and economic organization. The issue of identifying cultural groups, however, has largely been left aside as associated with an outmoded brand of archeological theory.

If a major research issue flowing from advances in modeling cultural evolution, however, is the identification of cultural groups and the specification of relationships between them, then there is a better rea-son for paying attention to archeological evidence for cultural identities than previously existed. In the kind of situation that the group selection approach to cultural evolution envisionsa situation of competition be-tween different cultural groupsone could reasonably expect to find the traditional stylistic demarcators of cultural groups that have been dis-cussed both archeologically and ethnographically (cf. Wobst 1977). The facility with which one can distinguish different groups, then, by such traditional archeological hallmarks as ceramic styles is itself a piece of evidence tending to confirm the existence of competition between groups. Under such conditions, the cultural frontiers, marked by dis-tinctive styles, should be quite clearly defined (although also often quite rapidly moving). In contrast, if it is difficult to define clearly bounded stylistic regions, an environment in which competition between cultural groups is less marked is indicated.


It is not sufficient, however, simply to find evidence of competition between chiefdoms. There seems almost always to be competition be-tween chiefdoms, and the Colombian Andes are no exception (cf. Trim-born 1949). The critical issue for group selection models (which may be of the sort Carneiro has labeled "voluntaristic") is not hostility and warfare per se but rather correspondence between changes in form of organization and replacements of one cultural group by another. That is, if one is able to identify particular points of significant change in social, political, or economic organization, then they should ordinarily corre-spond to points at which one cultural group was expanding at the ex-pense of another. This should take the form not only of chronological coincidence in a region between major stylistic change in artifacts and significant organizational shifts, but also of a particular pattern of stylis-tic change. One must distinguish between stylistic changes that are simply shifts of taste within a single cultural group and stylistic changes that reflect changing patterns of cultural relations. For example, the successive waves of clothing fashion that emanate semi-annually from Paris and Milan are examples of shifts of taste. The rise to popularity of blue jeans on the international fashion scene, however, reflects a change in cultural relations; and the introduction and spread of blue jeans represent a different spatial pattern focused on a different cultural center. By making just such distinctions in the archeological evidence, it should be possible to distinguish successive changes in style within a stable cultural situation from the stylistic shifts that reflect archeologi-cally the expansion of one cultural group at the expense of another. The identification of centers of stylistic innovation and detailed documenta-tion of patterns of spread through time are critical.

For archeologists, this means renewed attention to a way of looking at artifact styles that has been out of style in the last couple of decades. Such attention, however, must also include making some new distinc-tions. It is not enough simply to assume that a new style means the arrival of a new culture. Rather, in each case, we must decide whether or not a change in style means a change in cultural relationships (that is, whether it is blue jeans or just the latest from Paris). This cannot be done with the kind of data from excavation at a few sites that formed the core of traditional archeological identification of cultures. Rather it must rely on data from systematic large-scale regional survey. In order to map out style distributions and changes in them at the necessary scale, one must locate an appropriate sample of the sites in a fairly large region and subject them to rather detailed chronological control. In two different senses this means a simultaneous broadening and narrowing of the geographical focus. Instead of discussing styles in half a continent


on the basis of, perhaps, a few dozen sites, it means carefully delineat-ing changing stylistic distributions in a region of a few thousand square kilometers or less on the basis of hundreds of sites.

Regional survey op such a scale has become a fairly standard item in the repertoire of the cultural evolutionary archeologist, but such surveys have not often paid much attention to the possibility of synchronic spa-tial variation in ceramics except occasionally to treat it as a nuisance that must be got around. For getting at the issue of relationships be-tween cultural groups, however, and their connection to social, politi-cal, and economic change, such data on spatial variation in style are the very essence. Concentrating on such data from regional surveys implies no diminution of attention to the kind of data on demography, politics, and economics that have come to be the mainstay of conclusions from regional survey. It simply means adding another kind of analysis to the mix, one that has usually been absent from systematic regional surveys (but see Garcia Cook 1978 or Byland 1984 for a counter example).

What is already known of the Colombian Andes makes it very easy to think in terms of such patterns of group selection. It is also an area that seems to offer a prime opportunity to recover archeological evidence to document such a process of change. It witnessed a long sequence of change in patterns of social, political, and economic organization, but all at a scale that should leave the major relevant competition between groups at the inter-societal level. This small social scale is especially important in providing the best possible opportunity to find the kind of pattern predicted by the group selection approach to cultural evolution. It is, for example, in the context of the Formative period of relatively small-scale chiefdoms that such group selection scenarios are most plausible for Mesoamerica. In the Colombian Andes such a context persists for a minimum of two thousand years instead of being replaced after only a few hundred years by a much larger scale sociocultural unit.

Such reasoning is, in part, behind my own current fieldwork in the Valle de la Plata of Colombia's Alto Magdalena region (cf. Drennan 1985). It is my own prejudice that we will probably fail to find the kind of correspondence we would expect if group selection models accounted for the development of and change within complex societies. The logic and potential power of models focusing on selection at an individual level seem more persuasive to mehence the selection of an area that seems to offer good opportunity for discovering evidence of the contrary pattern if it existed. In such an area, a failure to find the relevant evidence of group replacement as the major cultural evolutionary pro-cess is more convincing than in a less propitious area. The question, however, is ultimately an empirical one, to be decided by evidence about what actually happened. We do not now have enough such evi-


dence to argue conclusively either way. That is why I am doing the fieldwork that I am doing. At this point we are back to the enormous advantage that cultural evolutionary approaches have always hadthey lend themselves concretely and practically to empirical research aimed at testing their implications, without which there really can be no pro-gress toward more accurate and adequate models.

STAGES VERSUS PROCESSES?

Before moving from the subject of empirical research to that of the level of selection in cultural evolutionary models, I would like to dwell on one other implication of the kind of research program I have dis-cussed. To this point, I have emphasized one aspect of it: that this program represents empirical research dealing with models of general processes rather than specific factors. Models of cultural evolution that truly come to grips with general processes offer us much more powerful tools for understanding the specifics of a wider range of individual instances.

The kind of cultural evolutionary research I have been discussing does not focus on the emergence of chiefdoms or states but rather on processes of sociocultural change. My own research in the Valle de la Plata (which provides propitious conditions for the kind of program I have outlined) does include the emergence of chiefdoms, as well as considerable change within a chiefdom context thereafter. The models I have discussed, however, are not models of the emergence of chiefdoms, but models of sociocultural change. It is almost purely coin-cidental that a context in which productive empirical research seems possible does include such emergence. A general cultural evolutionary model of the emergence of complex society strikes me as just as much a contradiction in terms as a general biological evolutionary model of the emergence of mammals. Just as the vast majority of biological change that has occurred has nothing to do with the emergence of new orders, the vast majority of cultural change that has occurred has nothing to do with the transition from one stage to another. Models focused on ex-plaining such transitions offer us little in the way of understanding basic processes of change which must be more widespread. (This is not the place for a discussion of whether biological evolution is gradual or proceeds by fits and starts or whether it matters which mode predomi-nates.)

In this view I suppose I am concurring with one of the most persistant criticisms of cultural evolution: that it has reified a set of stages and thereby overlooked considerable amounts of societal variability that


need to be explained. I consider the kinds of models and research I have been discussing, however, to belong properly to the cultural evolu-tionary tradition for several interrelated reasons. I have never seen Ser-vice's band-tribe-chiefdom-state scheme as the essence of cultural evo-lution, no more than Morgan's savagery-barbarism-civilization scheme before it. The kinds of models I have focused on are evolutionary in the much narrower sense that the term "evolution" has taken on in biology.

Although these models do not focus on stages and transitions between them, neither do they obviate the utility of recognizing such stages and their transitions. It is thus not necessary or desirable to throw out the notions of stages and the numerous insights that their application has provided. We can, rather, build on these insights, and continue to use the various stages in the general descriptive context in which they are useful while moving on to add other concepts that will serve us as more precise and powerful tools. This simultaneously directs us away from a focus on transitions from one stage to another and provides a new scope for understanding other kinds of social changefor example, the enor-mous variety of patterns of organization that we find in chiefdoms at roughly the same level of complexity. Understanding this kind of vari-ability simply requires taking a broader view than that provided by models focused on the "emergence of chiefdoms."

EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON CRITERIA OF CULTURAL AND BIOLOGICAL SELECTION

Up to now I have dealt only with the contrast between models built primarily on selection at the individual level and those involving a major role for group selection (at least for complex societies). Both involve processes of cultural evolution that, while they may parallel those of biological evolution in one way or another, are separate. For both these approaches, the fact that cultural patterns are transmitted by a mecha-nism different from that of genetic transmission means that different processes and selective criteria are involved.

The first approach I outlined, however, makes reproductive success in the unvarnished biological sense the criterion for selection, whether the subject is culturally or biologically transmitted features. Certainly one of the basic tenets of cultural evolution and human ecology is that cultural patterns must, at least in the long run, provide for reproductive success. The real issue dividing the first approach from the second and third is just how long this run is. Several nineteenth-century religious groups that prohibited their members from producing offspring did not become religious groups of the twentieth century. Such examples indi-


cate the difficulties of perpetuating cultural patterns by strictly cultural means. On the other hand, the persistence and frequency of occurrence in numerous cultures of celibate priesthoods have attracted some atten-tion in theoretical debate and even empirical research over the subject of whether this apparently paradoxical phenomenon can be understood in terms of reproductive success and inclusive fitness or whether its explanation requires cultural evolutionary processes that are substan-tially divorced from those of biological evolution.

The "declines" or "collapses" often noted in complex societies also relate to this issue of the extent of separation between biological and cultural evolutionary processes. Certainly studies of prehistoric state-level societies are replete with instances in which an apparently suc-cessfully functioning state, often with a history of several centuries, suffers destruction or abandonment of its capital and general disruption of its patterns of political and economic organization. Among chiefdoms such events are, if anything, even more common, since chiefdoms often occur in contexts of numerous neighboring chiefdoms, among which the ascendancy of any one tends to be short-lived. These "declines" are often viewed as calamities with at least ecological roots. The paradox, clearly, for cultural evolution and human ecology is how processes that work to produce such successful meshing of social and ecological sys-tems in the development of complex societies can fail to continue to do so. There seem to be three possible types of explanation. First, a pattern of organization could cease to provide for reproductive success in the face of environmental change so severe and rapid that cultural evolu-tionary processes fail to keep pace. Second, even a successful pattern of organization could be replaced by a still more successful pattern through evolutionary processes of the same sort that led to its develop-ment. And third, if cultural evolutionary processes are separate enough from biological ones, they could produce a pattern that ran counter to fundamental biological success, perhaps for some time, until brought up short by fundamental biological needs with rather more sudden and catastrophic effects than those ordinarily visualized for processes la-beled "adaptation."

The first of these possibilities is difficult to accept on empirical grounds. Despite sometimes inventive attempts to explain much of the sociocultural change observed in the archeological record by reference to exogenous environmental changes, we know of too many cases of "declines" occurring in the absence of any such events. Although eco-logical/evolutionary archeologists often raise ecological problems in con-nection with such "declines," the most plausible accounts seem to cen-ter on ecological problems generated not by exogenous environmental change but by socioeconomic processes.


The second possibility, that "declines" are really transformations in which one pattern of organization is replaced by another more success-ful one, is also far-fetched on empirical grounds. The replacement of one pattern of organization by another more successful pattern, however it happens, is the stock in trade of evolutionary anthropology. If "de-clines" looked like this, they would not be called "declines." They would simply be classed with other episodes of cultural evolution in action. The essence of classification as a "decline" or a "collapse" is that it appears to be a reversal in the evolutionary process. A develop-ment of complex patterns somehow seems to fail, and the result is not a new and yet more successful pattern but apparently a return to a pattern of organization that had existed previously but been replaced by the pattern that subsequently "collapsed." From this aspect of the situation comes the paradox for cultural evolution. If the pattern that eventually "collapsed" was more successful than what it replaced (and that is how we explain its development and persistence), then a return to the less successful pattern cannot be understood in the same terms.

The third possibility really is the only one that seems consistent with the empirical reality that the notion of "decline" or "collapse" is con-jured up to characterize. At the very least, the idea that cultural evolu-tion is separate enough from biological evolution to allow some diver-gence of optimal results fits best with the broad understanding we have of what the essence of "declines" is. This means that, in the short term at least, cultural evolution is not maximizing the criterion of biological reproductive success but cultural reproductive successthat is, the success a cultural trait or pattern has at reproducing itself by cultural means. Ultimately, biological reproductive success may be a more im-portant criterion because, in the long run, a cultural trait or pattern is not likely to be very good at reproducing itself if it does not provide well for the biological reproduction of the people in whom it has its only existence. The speed with which both change and transmission are possible in the cultural realm, however, means that if the immediate selective criterion of cultural evolution is cultural reproduction, there could be substantial divergence of the immediate interests of cultural reproduction and those of biological reproduction before the inevitable day of biological reckoning.

On empirical grounds, then, the third possibility accords best with our general view of what the nature of a "decline" is. This has implica-tions for the three major evolutionary approaches I have been discussing because they are not all compatible with this third possibility. In par-ticular, the first approach (the use of inclusive fitness, in the straight biological sense, as the immediate criterion of cultural as well as bio-logical evolution) provides for no criterion of cultural evolutionary selec-


tion separate from the biological one. The divergence envisioned by the most likely account could not arise. The empirically observed nature of "declines" or "collapses" of complex societies, then, seems inconsistent with an evolutionary model that sees cultural evolution as directly maxi-mizing inclusive fitness. (The same could be said of the practices de-scribed in several chapters in this volume concerned with the Asian tropicspractices that do not lead to long-term ecological stability. Humans, especially those in complex societies, apparently do not al-ways act in the short term in accordance with their overall long-term best reproductive interests.)

The other two approaches both provide for the requisite intervention of criteria of cultural selection not precisely coterminous with biological ones. Thus, my characterization of the empirical nature of complex society "decline" does not provide sufficient grounds to choose between them. Consideration of the other two approaches, however, does provide some indication of how empirical studies of cultural "declines" could contribute to their relative evaluation.

The major distinction between those two approaches is whether the level of selection, in the case of complex societies, focuses on groups or individuals. "Declines" provide another purchase point for distin-guishing these processes. If the level of selection is focused on the individual, then one might expect to find empirical evidence of substan-tially greater cultural continuity through a "decline" than if selection is focused at the group level. The processes by which a sequence of cul-tural evolution that diverged too radically from the satisfaction of bio-logical selection criteria is brought up short should parallel those through which it emerged in the first place. If it was the group qua group that was the principal unit of selection, then the group qua group should be the unit that "declines." The pattern of its replacement by something else should look like the replacement of one group by another group. If, on the other hand, it was cultural selection on the individual level that was principally responsible for the development of the com-plex pattern of organization that ultimately "declined," then the "de-cline" should have an appearance of considerable group continuity.

Which of these patterns most accurately characterizes the "declines" of complex patterns of organization is, once again, an empirical ques-tion. Most of the information we have about such "declines" comes from the study of such events among highly developed states. In this context the archeological definition of the relevant groups poses serious prob-lems, since large states are composed of so many subgroups among which group-level processes can operate, and since these subgroups are hard to distinguish in the archeological record. This aspect of the em-pirical evidence, then, like the parallel aspect in processes of develop-


merit, should be easier to work with among the simpler and smaller scale complex societiesthat is, chiefdoms.

CONCLUSION

Although this chapter is certainly not a report of empirical research, it has tried to be about doing empirical research. The thoughts it repre-sents about doing empirical research that contributes directly to the resolution of interesting and significant questions about processes of sociocultural change spring directly from empirical research that cur-rently occupies the majority of my time. The issues I have dealt with primarily concern the level and criteria of selection for cultural behavior in complex societies. By focusing on these issues, I do not mean to suggest that they are the only or even the most important issues in cultural evolution. In particular, I have completely ignored the question of sources of variability in cultural behavior, which is at least as impor-tant. My intention has not been to provide a complete cultural evolution-ary formulation or even really to contribute to the continuing (not to say continual) theoretical debate over mechanisms, levels, and criteria of selection for cultural behavior. Rather, my intention has been to forge links between some issues in that ongoing debate and the kind of em-pirical research that can contribute to the resolution of the contention surrounding them. In such a direction lies progress toward better under-standing of long-term sociocultural change.

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Drennan - Cultural Evolution, Human Ecology and Empirical Research

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