Twentieth-Century Cultural Evolutionism

With few exceptions, early twentieth-century anthropologists retreated from the sweeping cross-cultural evolutionary schemes of the mid-to-late nineteenth century in favor of a research strategy - in America often called historical particularism - that sought to understand the unique sequence of development for individual cultures, focusing on diffusion of ideas and technology as the engine of change. This refocus was

Denotes common occurrence

Denotes rare or doubtful

Figure 1 Plate I from Pitt-Rivers (1906) illustrates how, in his view, various pointed stone tools developed from the primitive ‘side tool’ together with the approximate time spans of their use. (Originally presented, 1875. Reproduced by Courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.)

Partly a reaction against the high ratio of speculation to empirical evidence in the trajectories proposed by the nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists. There was as well a growing recognition of the difficulties in using living cultures as examples of evolutionary stages in the distant past.

In American anthropology, it was not until the midtwentieth century work of Leslie White and Julian Steward that cultural evolutionary approaches again became prominent (for more detail from varying perspectives see the Further Reading section). These taxonomies were more sophisticated than their nineteenth-century predecessors in their use of an ever-expanding archaeological database, and more explicit about the processes that could move a society from one level of sociopolitical integration to another. Indeed, these approaches were very focused on describing and attempting to explain the long-term trajectory in human societies toward ever-greater technological and political complexity. The resultant typologies found much favor among archaeologists for their ability to briefly characterize levels of sociopolitical complexity, using, for example, the concepts of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. They also championed a largely unexamined form of group selection that was being discarded in biology over this same period, and in general they paid little attention to the nature of the analogies they were seeking to make to processes of biological evolution. If, as the famous twentieth-century biologist Ernst Mayr claimed, ‘population thinking’ was one of Darwin’s most important contributions to science, and was directly opposed to ‘typological thinking’, it can be argued that the cultural evolutionists generally failed to think about societies as composed of populations, and their taxonomic schemes instead encouraged typological thinking.

The enormous intellectual ferment and discovery in biology, genetics, and ecology during the last half of the twentieth century finally began to penetrate archaeology in the 1980s, and when it did, it caused a great rupture that began to spell the end of traditional cultural evolutionism by around 1990.