Notes on Archaeology and Cultural Evolution
Evolution: meanings and historical roots
The chapter surveys how different theoretical approaches treat cultural evolution in archaeology.
Evolution is a contested term with many meanings across colloquial, popular, academic, and intellectual usage.
Understanding these meanings requires tracing the history of evolutionary concepts in archaeology and related human sciences.
Central claim: early evolutionary ideas were closely tied to the development of archaeology as a discipline; you cannot easily separate the two.
Core tension: different evolutionary schemes reflect different archaeological theories and practices, as well as broader trends in the human sciences.
Origins of evolutionary ideas: Renaissance to pre-history
Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) and encounters with non-European peoples sparked early evolutionary thinking.
Before the Renaissance in Europe, there was a notion of a historical past, primarily anchored in Biblical chronologies (e.g., Ussher’s date of creation: ).
Medieval culture emphasized repetition of custom and tradition to articulate past–present continuity for illiterate populations; there was little sense that the past was fundamentally different from the present.
Medieval images (e.g., St. George) portray past peoples as similar to the present, complicating the idea that past cultures differed in fundamental ways.
Encounters with “savages” in the Americas raised the paradox: they practiced none of the civilized arts yet could act nobly; this challenged Eurocentric notions of progress and civilization.
A common early solution: Europeans posited that the civilized present might itself have arisen from a past state similar to these non-European peoples, i.e., earlier human existence without modern institutions.
Early antiquarians studied historic and prehistoric monuments in Europe (barrow-digging, surveying) while also contemplating distant pasts.
Antiquarians concluded that different peoples in different places underwent similar social changes and processes, leading to the idea of a single overarching transition: from savagery to civilization.
This abstraction allowed for radical interpretations, such as a kingless past that could be a model for the future.
The notion of “progress” and universal social evolution began to crystallize in various forms during this period.
The Hobbesian abstraction and the prehistory of ideas
Thomas Hobbes (17th century) offered an abstract story of evolution: life before centralized power was “nasty, brutish and short.”
Hobbes framed his narrative as a critique of the political events of his own time, not a factual account of the distant past.
His abstract conception of evolution influenced later thinkers (e.g., Rousseau’s social contract, broader ideas of progress).
Darwin, Marx, Spencer: mid-19th century convergence
A convergence of colonial expansion, geology, biology, and ethnography around mid-19th century created new grounds for cultural evolution.
Morgan (Lewis Henry Morgan), building on Tylor and his ethnographic fieldwork with the Iroquois, published Ancient Society (1877), proposing a linear progression: savagery → barbarism → civilization. This formed a framework that linked social forms and institutions with concepts of progress.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels integrated ethnographic evidence into a theory of historical development: from primitive communism to capitalism; Maine’s ideas on kinship and social evolution influenced Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.
The ethnographic basis for Marx and Engels' arguments suggested that household and gender relations were historically contingent, tied to the state rather than universal constants; this influenced feminist theory and critique.
Gordon Childe (and his adaptations of Maine’s framework) linked these evolutionary ideas to the three-age system (Stone, Bronze, Iron) and broader cultural change.
Herbert Spencer popularized the idea of universal upward progression across all societies, aligning cultural evolution with notions of morality and progress.
Spencer argued that progress could be measured scientifically through positivist observation; the claim was that objective evidence from the natural world confirmed cultural advancement.
The phrase “survival of the fittest” was actually coined by Spencer (1864) in Principles of Biology, and he used Darwin’s ideas to justify cultural evolution and progress, though later scholars distinguish Spencer’s and Darwin’s evolutionary conceptions.
Spencer’s worldview supported imperialism and paternalistic governance: Europeans saw themselves as morally superior and scientifically justified to rule subject peoples.
The combination of Darwinian ideas, Spencer’s positivism, and colonial power contributed to a ladder-like, often racially coded view of humanity.
Pitt-Rivers (Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers) promoted evolutionary thinking in archaeology by displaying artifacts in evolutionary order to educate the public about progress.
The era linked evolutionary ideas with modern governance, law, and social reform, reinforcing a sense of hierarchy and teleology in human history.
The era’s discourse embedded racialized and ethnocentric assumptions into “scientific” claims about culture and progress, a legacy still scrutinized by contemporary scholars.
Cultural Evolution: formation of archaeological thought and its ambiguities
Cultural evolution became formative in late 19th-century archaeology as a discipline; it offered a way to organize prehistory and modern societies.
Sir John Lubbock’s Pre-historic Times (1865) presented a unifying narrative: societies move from simple to complex, with modern “savages” illustrating earlier societal forms; he used this framework to interpret prehistoric remains.
A crucial caveat: though nineteenth-century schemes often depicted simple-to-complex trajectories, there is no intrinsic a priori reason that this direction must hold in all contexts or environments.
The empirical record does not guarantee that more complex forms are better adapted to the environment; collapses and reversion to simpler forms (e.g., Maya Classic Collapse, Ancestral Pueblo) show non-linear possibilities.
There is no inherent moral justification that more complex forms are superior; Romantic thinkers sometimes argued that complexity carries moral decline, or alienation, challenging the notion that progress equals moral advancement.
The colloquial language of “savage,” “medieval,” and “primitive” illustrates persistent Western assumptions about progress, even as scholars debated the direction and meaning of evolution.
Evolutionary schema varied in their degree of linearity, from unilinear to multilinear frameworks; differences included how they categorized societies and what mechanisms of change they emphasized.
Unilinear schemes (e.g., Elman Service; Morton Fried) proposed broad, single pathways from simple to complex; both Service and Fried used ethnographic data to classify social forms and to link complexity with developmental narratives.
Service’s fourfold typology: band → tribe → chiefdom → state.
Fried’s fourfold typology: egalitarian → ranked → stratified → state.
Although both schemes used different terminology, they shared methodological features: collecting ethnographic examples and ranking or classifying societies by perceived complexity.
These schemes illustrate how archaeology drew on other disciplines (anthropology, ethnography) to formulate evolutionary accounts.
In practice, early processual archaeology used these classifications to identify archaeological correlates of each stage and then search for those correlates in the archaeological record.
Examples: Service’s predicted features of chiefdoms include settlement hierarchy, redistributive trade networks, and religious/monumental complexity; researchers refined criteria and searched for supporting evidence in diverse contexts.
The cultural evolution framework integrated archaeology with broader anthropological programs, emphasizing cross-cultural generalization and comparison (e.g., warfare, origins of the state).
Shapses in the North American tradition argued that cultural evolution offered a cohesive project that connected archaeologists with anthropology, enabling long-term, cross-cultural insights.
Criticisms of cultural evolution and the shift toward multilinear models
Critics argued that evolutionary schemas imposed outside criteria on diverse societies (flattening historical particularities).
Polynesia, Wessex, Iron Age Denmark, and the Anasazi were treated as occupying the same stage of evolution, with universal mechanisms for change, neglecting local variation and context.
The flattening critique also encompassed concerns that past cultures’ own perspectives and meanings were ignored in favor of external interpretive schemes.
A moral-political dimension: indigenous peoples’ ways of life risked being dismissed as relics of a past, with Western modernization framed as the only viable future.
Teleology: unilinear schemes implied a directed, preordained historical trajectory; critics argued that history could be contingent and open-ended.
Diffusion and contact: simple unilinear models largely ignored cross-cultural contact, exchange, and diffusion as drivers of change.
Agency and individuals: models tended to treat people as passive carriers of evolutionary stages, downplaying human intentionality and contingency.
Result: by the late 20th century, simple unilinear models were largely abandoned in archaeology.
The field began to embrace multilinear evolution and more nuanced approaches that allow multiple trajectories and the decoupling of evolution from strict hierarchies.
Multilinear evolution: multiple paths and heterarchy
Multilinear evolution rejects the notion of a single universal trajectory; societies can follow different paths, diverge, or converge toward different outcomes.
Boas’s critique in the early 20th century fostered a shift away from ethnocentric, linear progress narratives; the multilinear approach gained traction in North America as a response to ethnographic and political criticisms.
The idea that different societies can reach similar outcomes through different routes (or fail to reach a single endpoint) is central to multilinear thinking.
Chiefdoms exemplify how intermediate forms can exist in various contexts and may not neatly fit into a linear progression toward the state; contemporary analogues (drug networks, warlords) illustrate cross-context applicability of “chiefdom” criteria.
Crumley’s heterarchy (1987) redefines complex social organization as not inherently hierarchical; heterarchy means:
Elements may be unranked relative to others, or
Can be ranked in multiple ways depending on context;
This allows for multiple forms of organization (kin groups, religious bodies, age grades, trade networks) to be structured in diverse, overlapping arrangements.
Thus, complexity does not necessarily imply a rigid, single-tiered hierarchy; many societies exhibit a mix of ranked and unranked elements.
Multilinear evolution emphasizes contingency, diffusion, and networked interactions; it aligns with broader shifts toward systems thinking in archaeology and related fields.
Modern multilinear frameworks replaced staged progress with conceptions of variety, networks, and adaptive strategies across contexts.
Key concepts, terms, and exemplars to remember
Unilinear evolution: a single, linear progression of cultural development from simple to complex.
Multilinear evolution: multiple possible trajectories and pathways for cultural development; no single destiny.
Band, Tribe, Chiefdom, State: Service’s fourfold typology of social complexity.
Egalitarian, Ranked, Stratified, State: Fried’s fourfold typology of social organization.
Three-age system: Stone → Bronze → Iron Ages; a framework linking technological development to social change.
“Savagery” to “Civilization”: a foundational but contested binary in old evolutionary narratives.
Entropy and integration: White’s view that cultural systems become more entropic or more tightly integrated as they acquire more energy throughput.
Energy harnessing as driver of complexity: (Leslie White’s formulation; simplification of the idea that cultural complexity grows with energy capture).
Romantic critique of progress: concerns that complexity can accompany moral decline or alienation.
Diffusion: cultural contact as a driver of change, often neglected in simple evolutionary models.
Heterarchy: organizational form in which the ranking of elements varies by context; multiple potential rankings.
Phylogenetic trees: organic vs cultural; cultural phylogeny can be reticulated (network-like) rather than strictly branching.
Figures referenced:
Fig 10.1: St. George and the Dragon (medieval iconography) illustrating looks-like-us bias in past cultures.
Fig 10.2–10.3: Native American portrayals by John White; echoes of “early Britons.”
Fig 10.4: Clarke’s contrast between organic and cultural evolution; shows a forked (organic) vs reticulated (cultural) pattern.
Fig 28a–28d (Renfrew, Earle, Sokal & Sneath): phylogenetic trees illustrating organic vs cultural phylogeny and their time/dis similarity dimensions.
Important scholars and themes to connect:
Morgan (Ancient Society, 1877)
Marx and Engels (Origins of the Family, The State; Maine’s influence)
Spencer (survival of the fittest; positivism; moral dimension of progress)
Pitt-Rivers (public education in museums via evolutionary display)
Boas (critiques of unilinearity; emphasis on cultural variation)
Shanks & Tilley (critical view of function/adaptation/evolution in archaeology)
Mark Pluciennik (Social Evolution; critique of evolutionary approaches)
Crumley (heterarchy; complexity without strict hierarchy)
Renfrew, Earle, Flannery, Marcus (case studies in chiefdoms and pre-states)
Kelly (warfare, segmentation; later applied to pre-state societies)
Hodder (chapter on entanglement referenced as a connective tissue to the discussion of complexity and systems thinking)
Connections to broader theory and real-world relevance
The chapter situates archaeological theory within broader anthropology and social theory, showing how ideas about evolution influenced political ideologies, national projects, and debates about race and colonialism.
It highlights the danger of using evolutionary schemata to justify domination or ethnocentric judgments about non-European societies.
It demonstrates how different theoretical lenses (unilinear vs multilinear; processual vs post-processual; structural vs agency-focused) lead to different research programs, methodologies, and interpretations of material culture.
The discussion of energy use, technology, and societal complexity connects archaeology to broader questions about sustainability and environmental adaptation in modern contexts.
The shift from rigid hierarchies to heterarchy and network-based models resonates with contemporary understandings of social organization and complexity in globalized worlds.
Ethical, philosophical, and practical implications
Ethnocentrism and racism: early evolutionary theories often embedded hierarchical and racialized assumptions; contemporary scholarship critiques those legacies and seeks to decenter Western progress narratives.
Colonialism and knowledge production: the empire-era framing of cultures as stages of progress influenced both archaeology and public policy; modern work emphasizes indigenous agency and context.
Teleology and determinism: the push to narrate pasts as inevitably progressing toward states can obscure contingency and diversity of paths.
Recognition of contingency and agentive actors: modern multilinear and post-processual approaches emphasize human agency, choice, and the role of historical accidents in shaping trajectories.
Methodological pluralism: the debate underscores the value of combining ethnography, archaeology, paleoanthropology, and contextual analysis to understand complex social dynamics.
Practical takeaways for study and exams
Be able to distinguish unilinear vs multilinear evolutionary schemes and give examples of each.
Know the major figures and their contributions (Morgan, Spencer, Marx & Engels, Maine, Boas, Pitt-Rivers, Crumley) and how their ideas influenced archaeology.
Understand the criticisms of cultural evolution (flattening of diversity, teleology, diffusion neglect, ignore of agency) and how these criticisms led to methodological shifts.
Explain Crumley’s heterarchy concept and why it matters for understanding complexity without assuming hierarchical dominance.
Be able to discuss how energy capture and technology relate to cultural complexity, with a nod to Leslie White’s formulation and Hodder’s entanglement as noted in Chapter 8.
Recognize the tension between moral progress and material complexity, including Romantic critiques and the persistence of terms like savage/primitive.
Be familiar with the conceptual distinction between organic vs cultural phylogeny and what a reticulated tree implies about cultural evolution.
Summary of key quotes and ideas (paraphrased)
Evolutionary ideas have historically been used to interpret social change, but they carry moral and political weight and can obscure local variation.
Early archeologists sought general laws of cultural development but often did so within the moral frame of progress and civilization, a frame later contested by critics.
Multilinear approaches allow for multiple pathways, emphasizing diffusion, contact, and contingent events rather than a single ladder of progress.
The modern stance in archaeology tends toward recognizing heterarchy and networked complexity, integrating insights from anthropology, sociology, and cognitive science to better explain past and present social forms.
Notes on figures and diagrams mentioned (contextual descriptions)
Figure 10.1: St. George and the Dragon on a Gothic/early Renaissance altarpiece; used to illustrate medieval perceptions of the past and its continuity with the present.
Figures 10.2–10.3: Native American portraits by John White; exemplify European projections of “primitive” pasts onto Native peoples.
Figure 10.4: Clarke’s contrast between organic and cultural phylogeny; shows a forked (organic) vs reticulated (cultural) pattern, highlighting the difference between biological and cultural lineages.
Figure 28a–28d: Phylogenetic trees illustrating organic and cultural evolution, with three-dimensional sections showing time and dissimilarity; cultural trees are depicted as reticulated to reflect diffusion and network-like relationships.
Key historical milestones and dates to remember
1865: Lubbock’s Pre-historic Times popularizes a simple-to-complex evolutionary framework based on “manners and customs of modern savages.”
1864: Spencer coins and popularizes the phrase “survival of the fittest” and links progress to a positivist scientific project.
1877: Morgan publishes Ancient Society; one of the foundational ethnographic works for cultural evolution.
19th–20th centuries: Transition from unilinear to multilinear approaches, influenced by Boas and criticisms of ethnocentrism and racism.
1940s: Leslie White articulates the energy-harnessing perspective on cultural complexity; later revisited in discussions of entanglement and systems thinking.
Connections to other chapters and broader themes
Hodder’s concept of entanglement (Chapter 8) is cited as a related idea linking energy use, complexity, and social systems.
The multilinear approach aligns with post processual critiques in chapters discussing agency, interpretation, and the limits of functional explanations.
The shift from universal stages to context-specific trajectories parallels broader methodological shifts in anthropology and archaeology toward specificity, reflexivity, and contextualization.