Society for American Archaeology

Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review Author(s): Barbara J. Price Reviewed work(s): Source: American Antiquity, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1982), pp. 709-741 Published by: Society for American Archaeology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/280279 . Accessed: 19/02/2012 21:45
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CULTURALMATERIALISM:A THEORETICALREVIEW
Barbara J. Price
A review of the principles of cultural materialism (a synthesis of Marx's causal primacy of the infrastructure and Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection), this paper addresses certain substantive and metatheoretical problems of contemporary anthropology. A position paper, it is written from the standpoint that cultural materialism offers the most powerful and productive set of premises extant in the discipline for the explanation of cultural similarity and difference, stability and change, and for the nonidiosyncratic formulation-and potential falsification-of the broadest possible comparative and diachronic propositions. The implications of this position for disciplinary and subfield relationships in the social sciences are explored. Donnithorne: "... I've written to him, to desire that from henceforth he will send me no book or pamphlet

on anythingthat ends in ism." Irwine: "Well, I don't know that I'mvery fond of isms myself;but I may as well look at the pamphlets;they let one see what is going on."
George Eliot, Adam Bede, Ch. 5.

INTRODUCTION AT A TIME of active competition of paradigms in a discipline-a condition characteristic of contemporary anthropology-it is advisable to evaluate the competitors not only from the standpoint of data and interpretation, but also from that of metatheoretical criteria not often considered by social scientists. Competition of paradigms, while an essentially healthy condition indicating a period of relatively rapid growth in a field, appears nonetheless to induce or increase a number of uncertainties on the part of its practitioners. This leads to disagreements that often deteriorate into exercises in futility, because their underlying premises are unrecognized and unexamined. However, such competition does not imply that all competitors perform comparable explanatory work or do so equally well. For the present paper the central problem of the discipline of anthropology is the documentation and explanation of similarity and difference, stability and change in human behavior; the field as a whole is inherently comparative and diachronic and encompasses a wide range of subject matter that overlaps the empirical concerns of a number of other social and biological/biomedical sciences. In general, anthropology addresses this problem in a number of distinct and in part mutually exclusive ways, each with its own hierarchy of research priorities. Idealist paradigms, in their most general form, presume that behavior is caused by ideas, beliefs, values, cognitions, and comparable mental templates; explanation of behavior must therefore be stated in terms of these parameters. Materialism by contrast affirms that the causes of behavior are most parsimoniously sought with consistent reference to the material conditions of life. Furthermore, actual explanations of sociocultural phenomena encountered in the literature often display a greater or lesser degree of eclecticism, i.e., of mixture of criteria drawn from each "camp," usually on an ad hoc or problem-dependent basis. Others emphasize the role of history in attempting to account for the ways in which things came to be as they are and function as they do. In this discussion the term "paradigm," drawn from Kuhn (1970), is used in its broadest and most neutral connotation as a general intellectual program, a set of theoretical axioms that
Barbara J. Price, New York. Mail for Dr. Price will be forwarded by the Editor, American Antiquity.

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presents the fundamental premises of the field; determines research problems and priorities; generates research strategies, explanatory models, and theory at middle and lower levels; establishes canons of verification or falsification and the rules of evidence. Neither the logical difficulties entailed by Kuhn's original usage (Brown 1977), nor the questions concerning the current homotaxial state of anthropology or its component subfields (Meltzer 1979) will be addressed. One of the competing paradigms, cultural materialism, will be analyzed in some detail in the discussion below. Developed relatively recently in its present form (Harris 1968b, 1979a), its individual components have had rather longer intellectual histories. In part because of the comparative recency of its formulation the position is not widely understood in contemporary general anthropology. Its principal literature is as yet small and scattered (the reader is referred to, e.g., Ross [1978], Ross, ed. [1980], Schneider [1978], and Price [1978, 1979]). However, the current rapid growth of this literature warrants the present review of the position. Both its advocates and its various opponents (e.g., Sahlins 1976; Diener and Robkin 1978; Conrad 1981) quite readily admit its minority status in the discipline as a whole. Many of the criticisms leveled at it are paradoxically illuminating; they will provide an adversarial structure, a skeleton of misinterpretation on which the tenets of the position, and its empirical and metatheoretical implications, can be presented and developed. The reader is forewarned that this will be a position paper which, like any brief, is necessarily and consistently biased; these biases will be stated as explicitly as possible in order to clarify both what they are, and what they are not. The following general points will stand as major themes: 1. Unlike most idealist paradigms, materialism is consonant with an observer-oriented canon of proof, i.e., with verification or falsification phrased in terms of the operationalized state of the system (an etic research strategy). As such, it has no need for informant concurrence (an emic strategy) to establish or confirm a proposition. While both emic and etic strategies are legitimately applicable in ethnology (though with different consequences), this is not the case for archaeology. Especially in the absence of written documents, the fact that its informants cannot offer concurrence renders the etic option the only one feasible. 2. Contrary to popular misconception, cultural materialism does not preclude-in fact actually mandates-a systems model of causality rather than a single-factor or prime-mover model. Indeed, close examination of models of the latter type reveals that any postulated prime mover is itself irreducibly organized as a system (Price 1979). This does not, of course, imply that all causal parameters are of equal importance. Some will have a far more profound and wide-ranging impact upon the overall state of the system than will others, and cultural materialism provides consistent paradigmatically determined criteria for judging this. 3. Cultural-materialist explanation relies consistently upon a relatively small number of causal parameters, each capable of wide, though not infinite, empirical variability under specified conditions; each of these is modifiable in interaction with the others in order to account for both cultural similarity and difference, stability and change. In this way the epistemological criteria of breadth and parsimony are satisfied. 4. By direct deduction from the paradigm, material processes and phenomena are held to be preeminently implicated in the causation of similarity and difference, stability and change. From the standpoint of archaeology especially, such processes and phenomena constitute primary observations, capable of operationalization. Explanations based on these will be more powerful than alternatives based upon other postulated or indirectly observed entities. Background Considerations: Metatheory and Epistemology Evaluation of any theoretical framework in any discipline can be seen to be ultimately pragmatic (i.e., what explanatory work does it do and how well?) and competitive (compared with what alternative positions?). Such assessments necessarily require consideration of a range of epistemological and metatheoretical issues normally considered the exclusive property of the field of philosophy of science. Broad generalized questions of causality and regularity, or prob-

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lems involving the establishment of procedures for verification and falsification are rarely addressed within the social sciences. Yet the assumption that such regularities and canons of proof exist and warrant investigation is central to scientific thinking in any field. Contrary to the widespread, if often tacit, view that these will be "discoverable when all the facts are in," they cannot be induced from data alone; rather, they represent a way in which data must consistently be as a series of intellectual operations imposed on observation. Nor can one pretreated-i.e., that there is an "absolute truth"; rather, there are only more and less powerful theories, suppose and the presumption that the former will ultimately supplant the latter. From this perspective the role of theory is to generate and organize facts for some determined purpose. In the following discussion, therefore, the separation of theory language from data language-a keystone of the positivist/logical empiricist paradigm that dominates much of conconsiderably blurred in favor of a rather more relativist temporary philosophy of science-is position (Brown 1977). "Fact" is not taken as independent of theory but as in part determined by it; the significance of a fact is modified by its theoretical context and governed by rules of evidence that are theory-dependent. A number of interrelated characteristics of scientific thinking thus guide the present evaluation of the relation of theory to theory, and theory to data: science is hierarchic, competitive, and probabilistic. Scientific thinking is, first of all, hierarchic. Hierarchy refers to the coexistence of propositions at different, nested levels of inclusiveness from the most general to the most specific. A proposition's breadth is partly a function of the paradigm from which it is deduced and of its vertical and lateral deductive linkages. In one paradigm a proposition may be very general, the foundation of a wide range of lower-level deductions; in another, the same proposition, while remaining equally "true," may be much more restricted in its application. Unjustified transposition of levels, in which a proposition is arbitrarily made more (or less) general than its paradigmatic status otherwise warrants, constitutes what is called a category mistake (Guy Oakes, personal communication); an illustrative instance of this type of error in contemporary anthropology is provided by the case of sociobiology. Within the Darwinian paradigm acknowledged by sociobiology to be its parent, the designation of a trait as "adaptive" is operationalized on the basis that it outreproduces competing traits that do comparable work. This criterion of differential reproduction, that however, poses difficulties for the explanation of the behavior of neuter castes-difficulties are obviated with reference to the sociobiological concept of kin selection (David Post, personal communication). Neuter castes, however, occur quite rarely in the biosphere; they are found among some-not all-ants, bees, wasps (class Insecta, order Hymenoptera), and, probably convergently, among termites (class Insecta, order Isoptera). If the sociobiological explanation is the strongest extant for these special-case instances, this does not mean that the principle of kin selection necessarily constitutes a general law of living systems. While the principle must conform to the general laws of evolution (it does), it cannot, given the absence of adequate justification by sociobiologists, be elevated to the higher level of inclusiveness. An initial corollary to the principle of hierarchy, therefore, maintains that there is an inherent asymmetry in the relationship of propositions at different levels that underwrites the procedures by which they are tested. A more specific proposition, deduced from a more general one, cannot legitimately contradict the latter even where it modifies or circumscribes its application: both belong to the same universe of discourse, and the more specific statement represents to some extent a special case. Where a contradiction exists in principle, it is probable that the lower-order statement is wrong or has been incorrectly derived. A second such corollary entails the testing of a theory at any level, not only against "the facts" (as everyone already "knows"), but simultaneously against the entire hierarchic network of theory itself, both downward against other propositions derived from it and the observations they generate, and upward against the more inclusive propositions from which it is deduced. Most "facts" or "data" constitute relatively low-level observations, potentially consonant with or explicable by a number of quite different theories, if perhaps in different ways. "The facts," accordingly, do not speak for themselves, lack an independent power to falsify, and constitute

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evidence only insofar as they are accounted for by some theory. Testing of theory against data represents only half of a more complete testing procedure: a theory can be deposed only by a more powerful theory, not by "facts" alone (Lakatos 1970). Following the principle of hierarchy, the more powerful theory will be the one with the closer and more direct vertical and lateral network ties. Thus, at all hierarchic levels, including that of the paradigm, scientific thinking is competitive. Of the numerous theories generated by deduction from even a single paradigm, some will clearly be complementary-will deal with discrete, nonoverlapping types of special case, or will coexist at different, noncomparable levels of inclusiveness. For example, Conrad's (1981) treatment of split inheritance in the Andes is, in the latter instance, a warning. Split inheritance in no way impugns, or even really addresses, the paradigm of cultural materialism (or any other). A specialcase instance, it must be explained on the basis of some higher-order generalization, with which it is not coordinate and for which it cannot substitute without incurring another category mistake. As the hypothesis now stands, it "floats" at the middle level, unanchored by the logically requisite deductive link upward through the hierarchy. On the other hand, cultural materialism does compete directly with historical or dialectical materialism, at the level of the mechanism by which natural selection in they are presumed to account for their observed consequences-Darwinian the first case, the Hegelian dialectic in the second. In such cases of legitimate competition the stronger of two theories or explanations is the one which explains the greater range of phenomena, or does so more parsimoniously. As with the principle of hierarchy, testing each of the competitors against the facts is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of the overall procedure. Often, indeed, competing theories are quite capable of accounting for each other's facts; if the position of, on the one hand, Blanton et al. (1979), Blanton (1978, 1980), and Kowalewski (1980) is compared with that of Santley (1980) and Sanders and Nichols (1981) on the other, it is evident that the facts of settlement distributions in the Valley of Oaxaca are not the crux of the dispute. By analogy with the Darwinian paradigm, competition of this sort provides the equivalent of the variation that is a necessary condition for the operation of natural selection. At certain periods in the histories of scientific disciplines such testing, at least implicitly, of theories against other theories is unusually active. What is not, however, justifiable as a means of resolving such competition is a nonstrategy called eclecticism-the conflation of principles, research strategies, and canons of proof from two or more competitors on an ultimately ad hoc basis. This will result in a collection of propositions that by their nature cannot be compared with, or tested against, each other from any single logically consistent set of premises: the "holism" advocated by Freed and Freed (1981) is a recent example. Eclecticism, moreover, recognizes neither the principle of hierarchy nor the related point that some explanations logically entail certain others. Underlying the competition inherent in scientific discourse, therefore, is a third major principle, the principle of probabilism. A theory tested against data-the necessary but not sufficient first step-produces a correlation measurable against chance. A correlation of 100% is neither expectable nor requisite to confirmation, and should a correlation of 100% occur, the event could be analyzed as stochastic, i.e., as having occurred by chance in a probabilistic universe. This implies, of course, that the single counterexample lacks the power to falsify (Odile to the contrary notwithstanding, the generalization that swans are white is not vitiated as a generalization). Falsification as a procedure thus itself becomes probabilistic rather than absolute. Again, a theory is not superseded by a contrary fact, but only by another theory superior to the first when both are measured by the same epistemological criteria. The position advanced here closely parallels that of Lakatos (1970). Granted the tests against the hierarchy and against the principles of breadth and parsimony, the stronger of two competing theories is the competitor that consistently yields the higher correlations between the expected and the observed. Many critics of cultural materialism object that the position assumes what it sets out to prove-that its arguments are circular and its conclusions tautological. But on the basis of the foregoing, any theoretical position does this-must do this-to the extent that its task is to define

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certain problems as important and to direct the strategies by which such problems may be most profitably addressed, to provide the context that confers significance upon facts. Further, as the following discussion will indicate, cultural materialism explicitly provides grounds on which the propositions it generates can be falsified. In response to these objections, one may note that the alternatives are (1) some other theoretical framework, with different premises, which would nonetheless incur the same structural difficulty as this one, or (2) no theoretical framework at all. Much of American anthropology seems to have fallen, if effectively by default, into the second option. Separate but Unequal? Concerning Theoretical "Secessionism" in Archaeology Unless archaeology addresses the central problems of general anthropology, and does so in ways compatible with those of the discipline as a whole, archaeology incurs a risk of becoming merely a series of techniques of data retrieval, of which one might well ask Cui bono? Underlying the orientation of this paper is the principle of uniformitarianism, which mandates that processes observable in the present, under stated conditions, can be safely and legitimately retrodicted when comparable conditions can be demonstrated. Past and present are thus treated as explicable in terms of the same set of principles, the same reasoning; an intellectual framework capable of encompassing both past and present is necessarily more powerful than one mandating separate treatment of each according to its own rules. On the one hand the comparative basis of anthropology is significantly strengthened when past (extinct) examples can be included for study. Perhaps more to the point, it is preferable in a diachronic discipline to collect diachronic data as directly as possible; reconstruction of such information by indirect means, although a legitimate and often justifiable procedure, is inevitably less satisfactory. These points are advanced in full recognition of a recent tendency in archaeology (cf. Clarke 1968) to disciplinary "separatism": advocacy of the position that archaeology "requires its own theory." This separatist stance is rejected in the present paper as unproductive, as having in fact generated no theory above the middle level. And it is precisely at the middle level and below that archaeology does require special-case statements. Such statements, however, cannot be taken as a rallying cry for paradigmatic independence. Indeed, as noted earlier, they acquire significance only insofar as they are explicitly linked to higher-order generalizations. This paper advocates a cultural-materialist paradigm as fully consonant with the generally accepted aims and goals of archaeology, a subfield that currently appears to lack effective or explicit higher-order direction. On however preliminary a basis, the foregoing offers a framework for examination of the development of specifically archaeological theory in the period approximately contemporary with that of cultural materialism, notably the position known as the "new archaeology." Although in many ways comparable with the materialist paradigm (in reaction to historical particularism, both are overtly concerned with the lawfulness of behavior), the "new archaeology" does not operate at a comparable hierarchic level. From its inception its emphasis was upon middle-level and lowerlevel theory, and its focus was on the methodology of data retrieval, description, processing, and interpretation. Its metatheoretical roots, moreover, are more deeply imbedded than are those of cultural materialism in a relatively narrowly construed logical empiricist tradition. In that the tenets of this "school" have to some extent become common currency in American archaeology, the position has in recent years lost much of its distinctive identity, even where heirs and successors can still be recognized. This very ascendancy of much of its content, however, warrants some consideration of its development. As is probably usual, the paradigms of the borrowing field, not those of the donor, determine or circumscribe the impact of the borrowed elements. In the case of the "new archaeology" the massive and deliberate infusion of concepts taken from the philosophy of science represents almost entirely borrowings from the logical empiricism dominant in the latter discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. The work of Hempel especially had wide influence (cf. Binford 1972; Redman 1973; Watson et al. 1971; Salmon 1975; Schiffer 1976), despite the fact that this work, in the discipline in which it originally "belonged," is rather specialized and representative of only one of

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a number of competing positions within logical empiricism itself (Brown 1977). In its new home this body of concepts assumed a degree of generalization and dominance it originally lacked, probably because much of its original context was not concomitantly borrowed. Thus, while tests against data are well developed, tests of theory against competing theory upward and laterally through the hierarchy are in effect neglected. Perhaps in part a consequence of the almost exclusive concern of both the parent logical empiricism and the offspring "new archaeology" with deductive logic, the procedural emphasis of the latter might be considered expectable. What is surprising, however, is that the "new archaeology" begins its downward deductions at so resolutely middle a level, precluding significant generalization and producing a corpus of work remarkable (at least in retrospect and given its initially revolutionary program) for its intellectual conservatism. Interest in the higher levels has, if anything, dwindled. Despite the early focus on the discovery of laws there remains a sense of trivialization. Given the initial lack of emphasis on an overt use of higher-level theory to guide and direct work at the middle level, this tendency too might have been predicted; in any case, the results "float," unanchored at the top. The heavy artillery of deductive logic-even when this need not really be considered the sole contents of the arsenal-is trained on relatively insignificant targets, even when so many more ambitious ones are within range. In recent years, moreover, the "new archaeology" seems increasingly uncomfortable with even middle-level theory. For example, the linkage proposed by Deetz (1965) between observed changes in ceramic design complexes and the independently documented breakdown of matrilocal residence among the Arikara was embraced enthusiastically, if uncritically, by Longacre (1970) and Hill (1970) for the Southwest. Plog (1980) has responded in an interesting fashion to this formulation, more specifically to its extension: while he criticizes the methodology of data collection and statistical analysis, he seems to have made no concerted effort to develop a competing middle-level generalization hierarchically coordinate with the one held to be inadequate. The implication is that "the facts" are capable of torpedoing the theory-what Lakatos (1970) calls naive falsification. Major behavioral reasons, other than the statistical, that explain why the Longacre-Hill extension is misguided, are suggested but not explored. Thus, even the falsification of this one instance does not test, much less vitiate, the original generalization. The preoccupation with methodology for its own sake, as Meltzer (1979) concurs, is an intellectually conservative retreat; it seems, indeed, parallel to the trajectory of American sociology in this century. Granted that archaeology confronts certain substantive and theoretical problems peculiar to it. Questions of chronology, for example, do not arise in ethnology, an essentially if not exclusively synchronic field; these questions necessarily require distinctive methods and techniques, treatment of which lies beyond the scope of this discussion. Despite the obvious necessity for developing and refining methodologies appropriate to investigation of more general causal problems, it is ultimately the latter that are the raison d'etre of the former; very little of this work actually raises inherently theoretical questions. In ethnography, furthermore, behavior can be observed directly, while in archaeology much behavior must be reconstructed, indirectly, from its still-observable consequences. If such a step mandates consistent procedures of its own, it does not follow that these operations constitute theory above the very lowest level, if that. The principle of hierarchy indicates that any such procedures are themselves directed and their application guided by middle-level and higher-level theory, however implicit; the former do not substitute for the latter. Finally, where both emic and etic research strategies are legitimately and appropriately applicable in ethnography, only the etic option is open to archaeologists if they are to produce statements that can be either operationalized or falsified. Counter to the strongly emic tendency observed in the cultural anthropology of recent years, this paper suggests a potential alliance between archaeology and an etic ethnology (Harris 1968a), an alliance justified by comparability of paradigm. They share far more, even given the difference in traditional subject matter, than either does with an idealist cultural anthropology governed by an emic research strategy.

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CULTURALMATERIALISM:WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT Like any materialist paradigm cultural materialism maintains that human behavior-its similarities and differences, stability, and change-is best explained with consistent reference to the material conditions of life. Although the existence of consciousness, intentions, beliefs, ideals, values, and comparable mental constructs is not impugned by such a strategy, such phenomena are regularly treated as explananda, and as epiphenomenal to processes more powerfully explained in other terms; propositions concerning them will therefore be relatively low on the hierarchy. This section will present the principal tenets of the cultural-materialist position, in part by contrasting it first with what it is not, and second with some of the more frequent misinterpretations found in the literature and the grapevine and tendered in criticism. Cultural materialor dialecism will then be differentiated from the more prevalent form of materialism-historical the basis of the mechanism held to account for its operation. Finally, tical materialism-on justification for this procedure will be presented. Marx and Darwin Historically the causal primacy of the material is a position associated with the work of Marx, one which, however, had its greatest impact upon anthropological theory through the work of Julian Steward ([1936] and especially [1955]). Marx's division of the behavior stream into infrastructure (broadly, the technoeconomy of production), structure (domestic and political economy), and superstructure (ideology) reappears in White's (1949) distinction of technology, sociology, and ideology. As presently used, the definitions of these concepts basically follow those of Harris (1979a). Actually, there is considerable ambiguity in Marx's own writing concerning which behaviors are properly assigned to which sector, and Marx's actual or self-proclaimed intellectual heirs have muddied these waters still further. Many of the resulting disputes have approached the truly scholastic and lie mercifully beyond the scope of this paper. Steward's (1955) differentiation of core (those features empirically determined to be most closely related to subsistence economy) and secondary features (those less directly linked and accordingly capable of considerably greater variability), while crosscutting the Marx schema to some extent, resembles it in function. Both writers set forth an explanatory hierarchy of traits, a series of investigative priorities, a distinction of classes of behaviors that directs the study of the interrelations among them. The Steward strategy relies less on a "layering" of discrete traits, more on empirical identification of type of actual systemic function and degree of systemic impact of behaviors along a continuum of "more closely related . . . less closely related." Readily amenable to both operationalization and to quantification, this method of assignment permits "the same" trait to be treated as a core feature in one context, a secondary feature in another depending on the work actually performed in a given system. The investigative priority of the infrastructure or core is directed by the observation that much of life is actually spent making a living, that this is a necessary condition for any other behaviors, and that the arrangements for doing this successfully will affect or influence other behaviors. "Orthodox" Marxism and most, if not all, its descendants, rely on the Hegelian dialectic to provide a mechanism by which the theory operates to produce its effects, in this case a mechanism based on the resolution of inherent contradictions or oppositions in a system. Structural Marxists especially appear to concentrate on the dialectical mechanism of explanation to the virtual exclusion of Marx's more substantive and more significant contribution to theory, notably the principle of the causal primacy of the material conditions of life (cf. Harris 1979a:Chapter 8). They may perhaps be more appropriately called structural Hegelians rather than structural Marxists. But because neither a "contradiction" nor its "resolution" can be reliably operationalized, independent observers cannot reliably agree that a specific observation constitutes an example of either. Hence, there is no basis except faith for the intersubjective validity required for all scientific

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discourse. Given that the causal primacy of the infrastructure is taken as the fundamental premise of any materialist strategy, it may be noted that many, if not all, of the relevant parameters will be quantitative in range of values and in operation, and that all are linked in relations of positive and negative feedback. Under such circumstances, analysis in terms of dialectical opposites seems intellectually tortured. For the mechanism of the dialectic, cultural materialism substitutes Darwinian natural selection (Price 1978, 1979), a statement of nonrandom survival of some, but not all, randomly occurring variations in a system. This strategy is the more powerful (it can explain stability as well as change), more parsimonious (it postulates no additional principles or entities), and has greatly expanded and more direct lateral and hierarchic ties through the general structure of theory (see below). Variation is effectively random with respect to the factors that govern differential retention or modification of the variants; it arises constantly in all living systems and does not, in terms of an evolutionary paradigm, require explanation. While Darwin himself did not do so, we may legitimately accept this as given. It constitutes a necessary condition for selection, the process that explains why some variants will be perpetuated, others modified, and still others eliminated-a nonrandom process operating upon raw material that is taken to be random at this level (at other levels, e.g., the biochemical, regularities can be assumed). Note that this paradigm explicitly eschews the teleology often attributed to it: the "need for" a particular variant under specified circumstances will not call it forth, regardless of whether such need is in any way perceived. Similarly, human foresight, purpose, planning-often cited to justify a "suspension" of natural selection in the domain of cultural behavior-cannot be invoked to explain either the persistence or the rejection of behaviors. Instead, these mental constructs serve only to generate variation in the system, upon which selection, neither guided nor controlled by man, operates continuously and in a quite impersonal fashion. Should a favorable variant occur, by chance, it should out-reproduce competing variants, i.e., those that do comparable work but not so well under specified conditions. Contrary to widespread assumption, therefore, no evolutionary random, paradigm can deal with the problem of "origins" (cf. Diener and Robkin 1978); these idiosyncratic, and essentially historical. Harris's own usage (e.g., 1977) is in this sense misleading; closer reading reveals it as a shorthand for differential survival or reproduction. Establishment of a trait within a system is not sensu strictu a problem of origins at all, but of differential reproduction; thus, the analytical separation of"function" (impact upon the system) from origins is justified. What is, however, unwarranted is the assumption that function and difthat "functional ecology" has ferential reproduction of traits are similarly unrelated-i.e., nothing to do with evolution. What it has nothing to do with, instead, is history. An adaptive trait is operationalized simply on the basis of its differential reproduction. Adaptation, in this sense, is a quantitative process, one involving assessment of degree, of "more than"/ "less than." While there may be no such thing as a completely nonadaptive (adaptively neutral) trait, selection pressure is clearly more stringent on some than on others. As measured by the index of differential reproduction there is a hierarchy of more-important to less-important phenomena, based on the degree of difference made to the system as a whole. It follows that adaptation as a process can be operationalized on the basis of numbers and distributions of populations bearing the trait in question. Beyond this statement the questions of what is and what is not adaptive, and to what extent, are matters for empirical investigation and cannot be deduced a priori. More to the point, adaptation-and evolution in general and in principle-is necessarily short-term and opportunistic. To consider a trait "adaptive in the long run" is a contradiction in terms, and any analysis invoking such a concept is illegitimate in principle; Romer's Rule correctly directs investigation to the immediate survival value of any innovation. "The long run" is nothing more than a continuous series of short runs, of nows, placed end to end and-if a "long run" is to be discerned at all-linked by an uninterrupted positive feedback loop; whatever the "payoffs" of a given trait, these are and must be in the now only. Although considerable misunderstanding attends the Darwinian model itself, its extension to cultural phenomena raises additional controversy; in classical Marxism its application constitutes the long-standing heresy of "mechanical" materialism. Apart from this, however, there

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seems to be a chronic, if unexamined, impression that such extension is either reductionist (entailing a "biologizing" of aspects of behavior not under demonstrable genetic control), or in some sense metaphorical (translated from one domain to another, either as homology or merely as analogy). Underlying this group of related problems is the misapprehension that Darwinian selection is applicable only to biological traits, genetically transmitted-traits for which the term "reproduction" is interpreted quite literally to imply a particular set of mechanisms taken as given, and for which the criterion of reproductive success is a priori, built firmly into the definition of the concept of adaptation. The immediately following discussion will explore these issues in some detail, in an attempt to distinguish what is logically and substantively essential to selection theory from what may be regarded as accidental accretions to it. To the extent that this attempt is successful, the result will develop the potentially radical position that, whether applied to biology or to culture, the natural selection invoked in both is the same process. Cultural materialism in no way implies that biological heritability constitutes a necessary condition for the operation of selection. In effect, the assumption of a particular mechanism of reproduction of traits is rejected as not required by the theory. Logically all that is requisite is that in all cases there be some regular, consistent, and specifiable means of transmission of traits regardless of the substantive nature of those means (a matter for empirical investigation). Darwin himself, with no reference to Mendel's work and with no access to molecular genetics, specified no consistent or correct mechanism of transmission; logically and epistemologically there was no necessity for him to do so (the very real pressures were sociological ones). Without compromise of epistemological legitimacy, therefore, such a mechanism can equally comprise the teaching and learning that govern cultural behavior. Such a distinction of means of transmission is in fact a convenient basis for differentiation of these two spheres of inquiry, and accounts for the clearly observed differences in the transmission process when the two spheres are compared. In the instance of learned behaviors, transmission can occur far more rapidly than is possible for the biological reproduction of genetically heritable traits; "donor" and "recipient" populations need not be related through common ancestry or interbreeding. What has been accomplished thus far is the removal of the question of specific means of transmission from the province of selection theory altogether, to suggest instead that the problem is far more closely related to the broader issue of how a trait comes to exist in a system-i.e., to the question of origins in its most general sense. Some may consider this strategy to be an access of purism, an unnecessary restriction of the scope of the theory. Yet, as noted previously, natural selection cannot and technically need not account for the entry of traits into a system, but only for their differential retention, modification, or elimination. Assuming only the transmission of traits as a necessary condition, the ways in which the transmission is actually achieved is analytically irrelevant to their eventual "fate." It is only this last that selection theory is capable of addressing. Thus, it is both possible and productive to assert that "steel axes outreproduce stone axes" (i.e., the former spread at the expense of the latter), or that "higher-energy modes of production displace lower-energy competitors in habitats capable of supporting either." In neither example is there any necessary reference to the gene pools of the populations emitting the behaviors in question; the behavioral changes described may, or may not, involve changes in gene pools. Ultimately, however, questions of genetic continuity, while perhaps inherently interesting, are analytically separate from and entirely irrelevant to the present discussion. As shall be shown below, the question of population numbers alone is central. For the present paper an adaptive trait is most broadly and neutrally defined as "one which facilitates its own reproduction," by whatever means it is demonstrated to do so. Reductionism, imputed by many to any attempt to apply selection theory to cultural behavior, ensues only when identity of mechanism is presumedas sociobiology does, albeit somewhat inconsistently, but as cultural materialism explicitly does not do. Despite differences in the mechanisms involved, however, the inexorability of the differential reproduction criterion definitionally integral to selection theory in biology is retained in the application to culture. A trait in either domain is designated as adaptive to the extent that it out-

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reproduces competing traits doing comparable work: this is true by definition, and the "extension" entails no alteration of this fundamental and essential aspect of the theory. Differential reproduction, however it occurs, accounts for the retention, modification, or elimination of a given variant, genetic or behavioral, for the changing frequencies of competing traits vis-a-vis each other. In both domains, furthermore, the criteria by which the process of differential reproduction is operationalized are identical: the numbers and distributions of populations bearing the trait in question. Since the same measurement of the degree of difference a trait makes upon a system is equally applicable to both, probabilities increase accordingly that we are dealing less with an "extension" than with the same process. Given this perspective, debate concerning whether the extension is truly homologous or merely analogous is entirely moot. Unlike the dialectic, therefore, a natural selection model is applicable throughout the biosphere, to all living systems including the special case of human cultural systems. In terms of criteria already presented, this renders the Darwinian mechanism more powerful than its dialectical competitor. If dialectics can explain the course of human events, they can explain only the course of human events, requiring additional statements to provide a link to the higher-order, more generalized processes of living systems. Without such linkage the mechanism necessarily floats-or, alternatively, deductively requires that human existence entails the suspension of the laws of life. This would be tantamount to claiming that human social life is not in principle, after all, a part of nature. A separation-dialectical opposition, if you will-of man and nature explicitly or implicitly underlies much of Western social science (it seems perhaps most notably, though not uniquely, developed in France); but its mere persistence does not guarantee its productivity, and cultural materialism rejects the dichotomy. While Darwin and Marx are more often contrasted than conjoined as thinkers, there is a solid substantive and epistemological bridge between them; to the cultural materialist they accomplish more together than does either taken separately. What provides that bridge is the concept of energy, here understood as the capacity to do work, and seen as potentially constituting the direct link not only between human society as a special case and the biosphere in general, but between the biosphere as special case and the rest of the universe. An energy criterion, in sum, provides a foundation for what could approach a unifiedfield-theory for the social sciences. Energy is calories; it is capital and labor; in some contexts it is money (a special case; the laws of economics-the more restricted domain-are hierarchically subordinate to the more generally applicable laws of energy capture and flow. The former must, and do, conform to the latter. Thus, the position advocated here explicitly reverses the relationship proposed by Rapport and Turner [1977]). Although the bulk of this paper was written prior to the appearance of Adams's (1981) stimulating and provocative analysis of Darwinian selection and energetic theory, much of the immediately preceding discussion is strikingly congruent with his treatment, even where he invokes a somewhat different set of intellectual ancestors. What is puzzling in the present context, however, is the partial nature of the convergence. Adams uses these bodies of theory to develop a position explicitly intended to counter cultural materialism, and yet his result is only marginally differentiated from it. He seems, in effect, to have fallen into the characteristic tendency to oppose Marx and Darwin in explanation. Thus, he loses sight of two facts. First, that the mechanism of Darwinian natural selection has always characterized the cultural-materialist explanation of similarity and difference, stability and change, and second, that this principle has indeed set it apart from other, competing, materialist positions (Price 1978, 1979). Furthermore, the variation on which selection operates may be stated consistently in terms of energetic differentials (see below); the primacy of the infrastructure is itself justifiable on energetic grounds. For the present paper the competitive edge of cultural materialism derives precisely from its synthesis of Darwin and Marx-a synthesis treated as fundamental by all of its practitioners even where one aspect or another may be differentially emphasized. Adams unaccountably fails to recognize that this synthesis is critical to a position that has never acknowledged any "contradiction" between the two contributions.

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Energy and Behavior An energy criterion for measurement and comparison is hardly new in anthropology. White's dictum that culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita increases (1949, 1959) has long been considered a virtual truism; Adams (1975) has used energy to describe and analyze poitical power. In ecology the work of sociopolitical systems and especially the concept Howard Odum (1971) uses energy as a principal integrative concept for his analysis of ecosystems. Certain general and fundamental implications of the energy criterion are especially germane to the present discussion. First is a statement of what might be called basic energy economy: all living systems must take in more energy than they expend to procure that energy (living necessarily entails energetic costs of metabolism, growth, reproduction)-the individual failing to do so dies, and the population failing to do so eventually becomes extinct. For a familiar cultural special case instance, the statement can be phrased more specifically: if you spend more than you ea earn, you go into debt; and if this situation persists, you go bankrupt. Any subsistence strategy, therefore, represents a compromise between two polar extremes-maximizing intake and/or minimizing expenditure. Living systems, in other words, are lazy and greedy; in this best of all possible worlds, maximizing laziness usually entails minimizing greed (i.e., cutting consumption) and conversely, maximizing greed normally entails working harder. Depending on the context, the substantive components of such strategies may be highly variable, but this set of constraints is universally applicable. One of the thornier problems confronting cultural evolutionary theory is to explain why, and under what circumstances, people can be induced to work harder, often for declining returns on their labor. Ultimately, this becomes an aspect of the classic problem of the explanation of inequality, in that nonegalitarian institutions play a significant positive-feedback role in the process. All behavior, furthermore, incurs energetic costs and yields energetic returns; both costs and returns are in principle measurable. Therefore, a statement of relative efficiency-the ratio of costs to returns-can in theory be used to characterize all behavior. A statement of efficiency, however, is a variable rather than a constant. Not only is its value altered by the manipulation of either term but, because behavior always occurs in some environment, some context, different occurrences of even descriptively "the same" behaviors may not be comparable in their efficiency. This suggests that comparison of behaviors according to the work they do, and how well, is at least as valid as the more traditional comparison on the basis of form. Steward's point (1955) that a trait may be a core feature in one system but secondary in another is closely related. To illustrate, the complex of wheeled vehicles and road transport had a different energetic impact in the context of Mesopotamia (where, interestingly, it is established relatively early) from that noted in Egypt (where it occurs rather late). Given Egypt's geography, most of the inhabited area was easily and efficiently accessible by boat; construction of roads would not only have been costly, it would have removed valuable irrigated land from agricultural production and thereby have raised the costs still more. The costs and returns of all behavior, relative and absolute, permit the investigator to construct an intersubjectively valid hierarchy of relative systemic importance of all observed behaviors. Those behaviors which harness, or encapsulate, relatively more energy will be relatively more immore generalized formulation of Steward's core-secondary distinction. portant systemically-a Natural selection should act most inexorably upon these behaviors designated as core to produce stability or change in response to actual circumstances. Because these are the behaviors that can be expected to produce the most profound repercussions on the overall state of the system, they are also the ones that should be most easily recoverable from the widest range of cultural contexts in terms of both ethnographic and archaeological data (assuming, of course, that the investigator looks for them). Energy-richer traits in a system determine or circumscribe energy-poorer ones. While such a deduction may not yet-if ever-be fully demonstrable empirically, it does suggest initial investigative priorities, thus serving as a preliminary means of evaluating competing explanations. It

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may be noted, for example, that trade (Millon 1973; Webb 1975) and productive intensification "compete" as prime-movers invoked to explain processes of state formation. Recognizing that this is merely one restricted facet of a wider and more complex debate (Price 1979), and leaving aside for the moment the question of prime-mover formulations and their epistemological adequacy, cultural materialism directs attention first to the parameter responsible for the bulk of caloric production. In most cases, particularly paleotechnic ones, trade-largely a long-distance trade in or indirectly employs only small numbers of a total population and represumptuaries-directly sents only a small fraction of the total energy harnessed (i.e., accounts for very little of a gross national product or equivalent); this generalization can be tested empirically. Thus the trade may be largely explicable on grounds of some energy-richer variable capable of underwriting growth in this, or some other, economic sector. Expansion of the scope of such trade, alteration of its patterning, enhancement of the professional specialization that attends it, and the size and structure of markets can be understood not as the result of some internal dynamic of the trade itself, but rather as a function of the ability of the food-producing sector to expand concomitantly. This last may be inhibited by some factor-land, water, labor-not related to, or addressed by, exchange. If such intensification is checked, growth in the trade sector should be checked correlatively. In effect, of course, these two "prime movers" are systemically linked rather than competing variables (Price 1979), although the linkage is asymmetrical. Finally, these are the behaviors that, given the convertibility of matter and energy, will most probably, and to the degree that they are systemically important, be manifest in material form. Whatever else a material object may represent, it is directly the energy expended on it. Natural selection thus operates upon the energy differentials of competing variants that do comparable work. Under any stated conditions some will perform that work more efficiently, either because they are less expensive or because they yield higher returns-or both. A more efficient behavior will out-reproduce, will displace, a less efficient alternative. Frequencies of competing behaviors conor decrease-as (the criterion of population numbers and distributions) will alter-increase ditions change. Population, Carrying Capacity, and Negative Checks Following Malthus, this paper assumes that populations have an inherent tendency to expand until that expansion is halted by the imposition of some negative check. Neither the extremely low growth rates for pre-Neolithic populations (Carneiro and Hilse 1966), nor the frequently observed incidence in human (and other) populations of behaviors, however motivated, which result in limitation of growth, vitiates this assertion. Contrary to the positions espoused by Cowgill (1975) and others, such phenomena may be taken, rather, to indicate the stringency of negative checks operating on such populations. Behaviors that regulate demographic increase in response to increased costs and diminished returns may themselves be a regular and predictable check on growth. A negative check-Liebig's Law of the Minimum-may involve whatever element (not merely calories) is necessary to survival, and that is available in the shortest supply. The substantive identification of the element cannot be determined in advance (David Post, personal communication), but the manifestation that it is limiting will always be reflected in the increasing costs of its procurement and the diminishing returns on such investment. A tiresomely recurrent criticism of cultural materialism is that it reduces all issues of cultural evolution to problems of protein procurement. This misapprehension stems initially from the instance of the explanation of the endemic warfare of the Amazonian Lowlands. Chagnon (1968, 1973) claims that because plantains, the principal staple of the Yanomamo, will grow anywhere in the habitat, and because there is ample agricultural land, there is no limiting factor imposing a negative check on these populations, and they cannot therefore be fighting "over" anything. The causes of the warfare must accordingly be sought in the nature of their political institutions. While concurring that agricultural land is not in fact limiting, Harris (1979b) has noted that a plantain staple must be supplemented with animal protein in order to provide a balanced diet. For

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a population lacking domestic animals (except dogs, which are not eaten) and which consumes little fish, that animal protein must be derived from the hunting of land animals. The latter, given the nature of tropical forest ecosystems (Ross 1978; Roosevelt 1980) tend to be relatively scarce and dispersed in their distribution. Relatively expensive to procure, these animals constitute the limiting factor and the focus of competition between and among groups dependent on them. From the perspective of this paper, however, it is entirely specious to make the general claim that a factor empirically shown to be limiting in one specified ecosystem is inevitably limiting in all ecosystems. Such a procedure is entirely distinct from the paradigmatic mandate that it is incumbent upon the investigator to identify the actual limiting factor in a given ecosystem. Substantive identification of the factor is an empirical matter, though its consequences as a negative check are not. In fact, at different times and places, and in different systems, arable land, water holes, soil fertility, irrigation water, and labor supply can all be identified as limiting. Another controversial concept, carrying capacity, is determined by the limiting factor, the negative check, and limitations upon carrying capacity are set not by the exhaustion of a needed resource but by the increased costs and declining returns on making a living. It makes little sense to point to unutilized resources that might have been used "if population had actually reached carrying capacity," or to cite such resources as unused and thereby infer that population has stabilized "below carrying capacity." On the contrary, resources can be defined only on the basis of their actual exploitation by a population (behavior defines the niche); some identifiable potential "resources" may never enter the system at all because their exploitation may be too expensive, too unprofitable, or too risky. The oil crisis comes to mind: untapped oil sources, long known, have remained untapped because getting that oil out is too costly a process-or has been in the past, when oil from elsewhere, even with the transport costs, was cheap and in reliable supply. A "resource" not worth bothering with at one time, under stated conditions, may become utilized as those conditions change. Population pressure, the obverse of carrying capacity, must accordingly be defined not in terms of absolute size or density, but in terms of the increasing energetic costs and diminished returns involved in sustaining a given way of life. Depending on the mode of production of a given population and the relevant conditions of its habitat, such pressure can occur at any demographic level. A population of hunter-gatherers may experience pressure in a habitat at densities well below .5/km2; that same habitat, populated by cultivators (different relevant conditions, different niches) may easily support densities in the hundreds. Observation indicates a range of possible responses to such conditions. Fission and emigration of population into areas capable of supporting them but not yet doing so-mediated or not by competition and warfare-may constitute one series of options. Or a population may intensify production at home (Boserup 1965), may work harder or longer or more frequently, and may accept a declining return on labor (i.e., may cut consumption), as it alters its strategy from one of maximizing yields per unit of labor to one of maximizing yields per unit of land or other resources. Conversely, any observed increased incidence of any of these behaviors or their material consequences enhances the probability of population pressure even if the latter is not directly or independently observed. Since the statement of basic energy economy is apparently violated by the process of productive intensification, the costs of this option must always be measured against the costs of alternative options for a given system. They will all vary with circumstances, and if the materialist paradigm mandates that these be investigated first, it cannot a priori predict their values. Moreover, the most efficient "solution" may entail a mix of strategies-colonization of some new areas, warfare (its consequences will vary with technoeconomic and sociopolitical context), intensification of production. What can be an efficient mix of strategies in one setting may be too costly-the expense of spirit in a waste of shame-or yield too low a return in another. In any case it is the costs and returns, regardless of the perceptions of the actors, that govern the proWbabilities of retention or elimination of a given complex of behavior under stated conditions. An additional consequence of reliance on an energy criterion for cross-cultural comparison is that while such reliance does not resolve the formalist-substantivist controversy, it demonstrates the

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irrelevance of the entire debate and thus moots it. Since this issue has inhibited nearly a generation of development in economic anthropology, any such refocusing is likely to result in productivity gains. Prime Movers and Systems Models Causal priority of the infrastructure is thereby justified with reference to the concept of energy: it is the infrastructure that is largely responsible for energy capture. This position differs from the technological determinism of White (1949, 1959), in that relative efficiency is here held to be determined by the systemic interaction of technology with demonstrably relevant environmental and demographic parameters that affect the costs of and returns from technological or other behaviors. Cultural materialism differs also, and comparably, from the environmental determinism, furthermore, are effectively prime-mover theories, whereas cultural materialism necessarily invokes a systems model-a procedure that makes it less "mechanical" than "systemic" Marxism. or negative-among component In a systems model of causality, feedback relations-positive elements are held capable of affecting the relative value of each and the state of the whole. No single factor, however designated, can be treated as a sole determinant; "the same" factor in the analysis of processes governing stability and change can be interpreted simultaneously as both cause and effect. A strategy of this sort obviates the often uncomfortable squabbling among competing single-factor theories (see the discussion of trade versus productive intensification above), all of which resemble each other structurally but differ among themselves in the particular prime mover selected. Thus, to debate "increased productivity causes population pressure" against "population pressure causes increased productivity" is to create an apparent head-on collision stubbornly unresolvable in its present form. This can now be more productively rephrased: What, under a wide range of conditions, can we say about the relationship of population and productive regime? When are these variables linked in positive (reinforcing), when in negative (neutralizing) feedback? With what consequences to existing conditions and to the overall state of the system? Prime mover theories, particularly when they compete directly, seem to result from the decomposition of causal constellations more profitably treated as irreducible systems (Price 1979). This procedure is far more common than its complement, the amalgamation of a number of singlefactor theories into a single systemic formulation by emphasizing the mutually repercussive relations among the relevant variables. Several misconceptions nonetheless attend the adoption of the systems model of causality. Epistemologically empty in itself, it can neither select the variables that will comprise it, nor assign differential weighting/explanatory power to any. But it cannot be assumed that all observed components will be of equivalent importance. Systems "theory" in other words is not a theory at all; it must be used in conjunction with some higher-order generalization, to which the tasks of selection and weighting ultimately fall. Kohl (1981) has, in somewhat different terminology, noted the separability of systems model from governing paradigm (cf. also Price [1979]). Those variables determined to produce the most profound effects upon other variables and upon the whole are defined as more important. When the paradigm employed is materialist, these will be factors identified and quantifiable as harnessing or controlling the greater amounts of energy. It follows that it is insufficient merely to document the appearance of a trait in a system; what is needed instead is specification of the energetic work it does and of the degree of difference it makes to the state of the whole. For example, much of the disputation concerning the significance of irrigation in the evolution of culture unfortunately reflects this form of error. From this definition of relative importance of various factors, moreover, it follows that the systemically more important traits should also be more obvious, in the sense that they should be more easily recoverable from a wide variety of contexts. As defined here, a systems model does not entail enshrinement of the concept of equilibrium as normal or necessary to a system. Were this the case, it could explain stability (maintained by

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deviation-correcting, negative-feedback mechanisms) but remain unable to deal with change. Yet Flannery (1968) explicitly addressed an overtly nonhomeostatic problem with considerable success. It is chiefly here that cultural materialism, with its strongly evolutionary emphasis, differs from the more functionalist human ecology of Vayda (1971) and Rappaport (1967, 1971). The latter position emphasizes questions of equilibrium maintenance and restoration. One is strongly tempted, indeed, to identify this position as the more appropriate target for the criticisms of Diener and Robkin (1978)-especially their separation of "functional ecology" from evolutioninstead of a somewhat idiosyncratically conceived cultural materialism. Contrary to popular belief, cultural materialism is not incapable of dealing with questions of structure or superstructure. Rather, the energy criterion suggests that the behaviors indicated by these concepts are measurable in terms of costs and returns (cf. Adams 1981) and thereby requires their treatment from the same set of initial premises and rules of reasoning. Accordingly, such behaviors will be of analytical importance to the extent that they are demonstrably involved in the overall energetic system. It is not inconceivable that the belief that cultural materialism cannot address these questions may stem in fact from its refusal to treat structure and infrastructure as the idealists do, i.e., as explicable only in terms of themselves, with reference to principles unique to these domains. Domestic and Political Economy Social and political institutions are expensive energetically in proportion to their size and complexity, with some institutions, or aspects of institutions, requiring more energy than others. Within this domain also there is a hierarchy. On the basis of the foregoing, the most important characteristics of sociopolitical structure should be most readily apparent to the investigator whose perceptions are governed by a paradigm directing attention to those characteristics. Much extant ethnographic description, however, appears to focus primarily upon secondary, effectively stylistic, features of social and political institutions, upon the terminology of relationships at the expense of size, composition, and physical arrangement of coresident groups, for example, and has tended to treat this sphere as not only autonomous but determinative. British social anthropology, known initially for such an emphasis, still seems to retain much of it. Ironically, perhaps, the "substantive" school of American economic anthropology stumbles into this same pitfall (Polanyi 1957) by advocating treatment of economic processes and transactions on the basis of their embedment in social institutions. Cultural materialists, while fully recognizing the relation of the economic and the social, would reverse the postulated direction of determinacy. That is, they would analyze the critical features of social forms as in effect the flow chart of energy capture and distribution. Other specifiable characteristics of social organization are treated as important to the extent that they can be deduced from or linked with the energy system. What is proposed, in other words, is a hierarchy of relative importance based on demonstrated energetic involvement-a hierarchy that contrasts in its basic premises with those more frequently encountered in the literature. Even "traditional" problem areas in social organization can, however, be approached from a number of avenues, no one of which is dictated by the inherent character of the data. Rather, the questions posed by the investigator determine the relative importance of the observations taken and recorded, and ultimately the uses to which they can be put. Lineality and the analysis of unilineal descent groups constitute a case in point. In the customary treatment of problems of filiation, alliance, corporateness, etc., there is a strong emic component, which focuses on terminology, symbol, the prescriptive and the ideal. Necessarily culture-specific and particularizing, much of the undeniably rich description that results stands as it own raison d'etre, generalizable only with difficulty if at all. When, however, social formation is linked to technoenvironmental and demographic context, it becomes possible to generate propositions amenable to comparative testing and falsification. Murphy (1979) has postulated that unilineal descent in Lowland South America functions as a rule of exclusion, limiting the numbers of potential claimants to resources exploited by a group.

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For the Tallensi, Worsley (1956) correlates degree of corporateness of kin groups with increased pressure on agricultural land; Meggitt (1965) notes increased emphasis on the agnatic principle among the Mae Enga in areas of land scarcity. It follows that bilaterality-a rule that maximizes recruitment options-can be suggested as a response to conditions in which labor rather than land constitutes a limiting factor in the productivity and security of a local population (cf. Price 1981). Because such propositions are generated from an etic research strategy and can be tested comparatively against the observed state of an energetic system, they can, on a probabilistic basis, potentially and in principle be retrodicted (see below) despite the practical problems unquestionably posed by such a procedure. Many contemporary ethnographic studies of political institutions, especially studies at the local level, have focused upon problems of leadership, information processing, and decision-making at the expense of the traditionally central concept governing political studies: power. Although an interesting body of data has been amassed, this change of emphasis is unfortunate-a birthright sacrificed for a mess of pottage-in that the concept of power can be operationalized directly in terms of energy (Adams 1975). Control of force (Fried 1967) is expensive, and thus necessarily implies differential access to the total energy produced by a population; since it is thus not a cultural universal, this point may account for its "displacement" from political anthropology. In general, political nodes of whatever type serve inevitably as energetic nodes, however structured; the roles of such nodes in information control and decision-making are analytically epiphenomenal to this function. One can explain on a regular basis why cultural systems, under specified conditions, should increase in energy content (and conversely, one can potentially identify negative checks which abort this process). But without reference to such increase it is difficult to explain why "information" should comparably and independently proliferate, let alone why, and by what mechanisms, such proliferation could account for institutional transformation. Information processing and decision-making, while undeniably human behaviors, involve little energy expenditure per se. The energy involved in making one decision rather than another rarely entails signlificant differentials of cost. Only the translation of the decision into some course of action, and the institutions involved in such actions, can be said to incur such measurable cost-return differentials. In that case it seems preferable, on grounds of parsimony, to accord explanatory priority to these behavioral/ energetic parameters directly, rather than to their subsidiary, if ubiquitous, accompaniments. The currently increasing interest, however, in information and decision models to explain processes such as state formation (Flannery 1972; Wright 1978) warrants closer examination of additional problems raised by these models. It is first necessary to distinguish the questions of why and how individuals make decisions from those of why and how the implemented decisions succeed or fail; the two pertain to different analytical levels. Because the two sets of questions constitute different research problems, evidence relevant to the former may be only superficially so to the latter; the questions asked dictate the appropriate use of whatever data may be in evidence. In an ethnographic context, the complex of motives and intentions that inevitably comprises a part of the decision-making process can be directly observed; even the strongly emic component of this complex is a legitimate and interesting subject of investigation. But such data for past decisions are unrecoverable in principle and cannot legitimately be retrodicted (see below). Thus, the only surviving observable evidence will be of the behavioral consequences of the original intentional and motivational complex and, hence, can stand in a specific relation only to a different question altogether, one amenable only to etic analysis. Second, it is erroneous to assume isomorphism between this complex and the behavioral effects it generates. This is the best-laid-plans problem. As previously noted, foresight and planning constitute one source of variation in the behavior stream but are not adequate to explain the retention, modification, or elimination of any possible variant-and these last are all that we can observe. Third, a related point: unless antecedent conditions (e.g., this complex attendant on decision-making) are analytically distinguished from ensuing effects, the result incurs the fallacy of assuming the consequent: the only evidence by which the conditions can be reconstructed is through their observed consequences. As a major problem confronting any form

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of analogical reasoning, this consideration will be treated in a later section of this paper in somewhat different form. Energetic definitions of cultural evolution suggest a recasting of Steward's "levels of sociocultural integration" as essentially arbitrary and heuristic chunks of a quantitative continuum with no naturally occurring breaks, rather than as a series of mutually exclusive taxa or "types" (cf. Service 1962; Fried 1967). Although a causal, explanatory, or descriptive model need not in principle be isomorphic with the data it orders, the consonance of the continuous-variation option with the data as they appear to the observer is in this instance suggestive and becomes still more so when both archaeological and ethnographic instances, treated in the same ways, broaden the total comparative base. Any classification is merely a convenient shorthand statement of similarity and difference on the basis of problem-dependent criteria imposed by the investigator. This proposed revision, while no exception, offers certain pragmatic advantages. The energetic changes implicated in cultural evolution are held to be incremental and governed by positive feedback. Hence, they are additive and scalar. Therefore, the behaviors that comprise them should reflect the addition of new work to old, with feedback modification of both, and should Guttman scale (Carneiro 1968, 1969). Since those behaviors which are systemically most important and most broadly determinative should be those most closely involved with energy harnessing and flow, they should constitute the principal basis of classification and should account for much of the similarity and difference observed from one system to another. Accordingly, terms such as "egalitarian," "ranked," and "stratified" are used in this paper in the continuous-range rather than in the typological sense. Such a strategy obviates the often thorny problem of "transitional" stages and "intermediates" (often the most processually interesting, if interstitial, aspects of typology); it moots both the arid bickering over how particular examples are to be classified (Sanders and Price 1968; Henderson 1979), and the illusory sense of accomplishment that seems to result from the assignment to one or the other category (even where most investigators would probably order the same series of examples in the same way). Superstructure: Emic and Etic Considerations Contrary to the almost ubiquitous assumption, a cultural-materialist strategy does not preclude treatment of superstructure, of ideology. Rather, the propositions it generates may be stronger than those resulting from the premise that this sphere is independent, precisely because ideology thereby becomes explicitly subject to the same canons of proof as any other component of the behavior stream (Harris 1974; Ross 1980). Idealists are most likely to assert the explicability of ideology only in terms of itself and to emphasize the causal priority of this domain. To the cultural materialist, however, behavior, including that manifested in ideology, performs work; it too is therefore involved to some extent in energy harnessing and distribution. Given this perspective, the kinds of questions asked of ideology will be different from the traditional ones. Governed by the paradigmatic difference, the new questions explicitly address problems that arise in the course of investigating the relationship of superstructure to other aspects of behavior. Thus, the resulting propositions may not conform to traditional expectations concerning how they "ought to look." First, apart from behavior associable with them, ideas cost nothing and leave no direct material impact upon the environment. It costs no more to think one thing than another, unless the difference entails distinct behavioral consequences. For this reason cultural materialism tends to treat ideas and beliefs as epiphenomenal to behavior, on the grounds that the more energy-rich trait tends to determine the more energy-poor one. Second, much of the content of ideology is treated as stylistic, as variable because variability makes so little systemic difference. What strikes many readers as austere in this procedure is that propositions are tested not against the beliefs or perceptions of the actors, but against the state of the system. Individuals in our own society seem, for example, to be adopting a dietary strategy of vegetarianism with increasing frequency. This practice is rationalized or justified by the practitioners on various grounds-health, "nature," purity, myth, religion, etc., all highly variable within the sample (an interesting potential research problem for idealists is the explanation of how and why

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quite different beliefs "cause" such similar behavioral effects). It is, however, inescapable that meat is expensive and becoming more so, and that household incomes have not kept pace with inflation. One response, not necessarily personally attractive or easily maintained, is to cut consumption. Regardless of whether the actors admit this motivation (few of them do), this last is the real consequence of their behavior, and the ideology, whatever its specific content, seems to make the practice easier. Interestingly, the changed practice would in principle be recoverable archaeologically where the motivations or beliefs of the actors, in the absence of written records, would not. This is basically Harris's argument (1966) concerning the sacralization of Indian cattle. The behaviors attendant on this complex are adaptive-they increase population numbers and densities-given the constraints of Indian ecosystems. But under crisis conditions they would be difficult to maintain in the system without, for instance, massive and expensive investments of force. Ideology seems, indeed, to have a regular systemic function, particularly obvious in stateorganized polities (although by no means limited to them), of reducing the costs of force which, whatever its payoffs, is nonetheless not cheap to impose. Rather cynically, it may be noted that the more people are taught to believe in the sanctity of private property, the less one need spend-within limits-on policemen. Particularly in the domain of ideology, therefore, the difference between an emic, actororiented research strategy and an etic, observer-oriented one is most clearly highlighted. It must be remembered that in the present context this distinction refers to the method by which statements are verified or falsified, rather than to data, much of which can, with greater or lesser facility, be accounted for from the standpoint of either. Cultural materialism relies primarily upon the etic option, as mandated by a natural selection model: selection can operate only upon expressed behavior regardless of its motive or purpose. Much of the history of applied anthropology offers a sobering illustration of this point. Emic strategies of proof are an apparent numerical majority in contemporary American anthropology; this fact does not necessarily enhance their productivity but only their familiarity. Many of them indeed, especially so when they are retrodicted in the absence of written documents, incur the Intentional Fallacy: i.e., if the only evidence one has for motive is the behavior itself, it is futile even to ask how well that behavior fulfills the actor's intention. Quite apart from the observation that living actors may not understand their own motives, are certainly not asking the questions we ask of their behaviors, and may lie like Ananias, in an archaeological context intention is usually inherently unknowable. Fortunately, intention and motivation do not govern the retention or modification of behavior within a system either; it is possible to build more parsimonious explanations on the basis of observed parameters than on that of entities inferred only indirectly from them. Inconsistent discrimination between propositions referring to the state of the system and those applicable to the individual actor's motives or behaviors entails misleading use of "evidence," which is actually only superficially relevant to the question one is asking. To illustrate, the cultural-materialist treatment of the evolution of systems affirms that natural selection will operate in the direction of greater energy efficiency under stated conditions. To some, however, this generalization recalls the "economically rational man" formulations of the past century. Yet oas ob basis, the two are not logically connected; the former does not imply the latter even on an and the two do not even refer to the same level of phenomenon. Thus, ethnographic "evidence" of the "irrationality" of the actors' motives (cf. Freed and Freed 1981) does not address the question of the kinds of laws governing stability or change in the system into which those actors were enculturated. Increased energetic efficiency is operationalized and quantified on grounds other than the behavior or interpretation of the actors, and it is to the latter that the concept of economic rationality pertains; why systems behave as they do is analytically distinct from why people behave as they do. This observation parallels the earlier note that the ethnography of decision-making is a different question from that of the eventual fate of the decisions translated into behavior, and that these two types of problem govern the relevance of different types of evidence. Again, to many readers the consequences of such a separation of levels will seem perhaps austere. Cultural materialism is capable of asking both types of question, but by regularly differentiating them can then systematically identify the nature of the relationships between

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them as constituting a research problem itself, a problem often masked when the levels are conflated. This point, furthermore, while distinct from the emic-etic controversy, is clearly not unrelated to it. A not inconsiderable debate concerning the pragmatic and epistemological ramifications of the emic-etic distinction and its utility in application is currently emerging. Limitations of space do not admit detailed consideration of this debate at present (cf. Ferguson 1980; Oakes 1981). However, it must be noted that the etic strategy complements rather than negates the more familiar and more accessible emic one. An etic strategy, in other words, need not reject emic inquiry as invalid or illegitimate. Recent work by Oakes (1981) indeed suggests that at a higher level of abstraction emic and etic strategies logically converge. In the pragmatic terms of actual application in the social sciences, however, the middle level-in which the distinction is retained on the basis of differential consequences to falsification procedures applied in specific instances-is the more appropriate. What an etic strategy does is to define a class of question (not necessarily of data) frequently ignored, for which treatment in terms of the perceptions of actors in the system is at best irrelevant and unproductive, and at worst unfalsifiable and misleading. In so doing it provides an epistemological basis for the validity of certain "nontraditional" forms of ethnography, a category that presently includes investigations as substantively disparate as the entire field of primate behavior and the relatively new field of ethnoarchaeology. IMPLICATIONS At a superficial glance, archaeological data, directly or indirectly so solidly "material," seem prime candidates for treatment within a materialist paradigm, which emphasizes the causal significance of just this type of information. Indeed, Kohl (1981) considers some form of materialism already dominant in the research strategies of American archaeology. Data, however, are neither materialist nor idealist, emic nor etic: only the reasoning, the research strategy imposed on the data and not the "facts" themselves, are so classifiable. Because such reasoning is imbecome evidence posed for a purpose-to answer questions posed by an investigator-"facts" only in reference to these; once placed in evidence their strength and relevance can be consistently evaluated. There are, in other words, stronger arguments for the adoption of a materialist paradigm in archaeology than the simple observation that so much of the data recovered by the methods of that field are material. Following the principle of hierarchy, moreover, some material data will be more important than other, equally material data; determination of such priorities is a task of paradigm. This section will apply the principles of cultural materialism to a range of problems, drawn only in part from archaeology but with evident implications for that field. Ultimately, justifications for certain types of retrodiction, largely from ethnography to archaeology, will be advanced. Whether assumed tacitly or addressed explicitly, these last are a central problem of the strategy currently known as ethnoarchaeology, a class of investigation at least as significant for the direction of contemporary ethnography as it is for archaeological work; its principles are those of a comparative, diachronic, etic general anthropology. Although Darwin could formulate a theory of biological evolution without reference to the paleontological record, and the earliest theories of cultural evolution (Harris 1968b) were developed without significant archaeological infusion (beyond data on the classical civilizations), such a strategy must be regarded as effectively faute de mieux. Methodologically, this option is in some respects justifiable; especially if the emphasis is on process rather than on details of form, the principle of uniformitarianism upholds its legitimacy. Ironically, therefore, a scientific proposition, in contrast to a historical one, is necessarily achronic. Yet not only was Darwinian biology immeasurably enriched with the development of paleontology, it would have been seriously crippled had it not been able to encompass paleontological data. The latter, in the absence of a consistent paradigm of biological process, would have been consigned to the status of a historical or antiquarian curiosity. Correlatively, a theory of cultural evolution would be compromised, both metatheoretically and empirically, to the extent that it could be consistently falsified by an ar-

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chaeology that asked comparable questions and invoked comparable canons of proof. Much of archaeology, however, seems to have failed to address questions of the process of cultural evolution in favor of concentration on problems of culture history and the development of style. Overlap of data has frequently masked the relevant epistemological distinctions, for it is not true that complete knowledge of entire historical sequences would automatically provide answers to evolutionary questions. Archaeological Data and Their Uses By deduction from the cultural-materialist paradigm, an element or relationship in a given system is analytically important in proportion to its involvement in the harnessing and flow of energy within a population and between populations. Given the translatability in principle of matter and energy, the probability is therefore high that such an element will directly, and such a relationship will indirectly but reliably, be expressed in material form. The more important the element or relationship, the greater the probability of recovery from a number of different contexts. Just as not all elements and interrelations are of equal importance, not all material traits are energetically significant merely because they are material. Nonetheless a paradigm that mandates material expression of causally significant parameters (among others) should be both reassuring and a practical guide to research. Here, the principle that the energy-richer components determine energy-poorer ones sets initial investigative and explanatory priorities. Some media are of course more energy-expensive than others-more difficult to obtain, incur higher transport costs, imply more complex relations of production that are themselves more costly to support. For example, monumental sculpture in hard stone requires more energy than ceramics, and architecture still more; relative capital and labor costs are quantifiable at least in principle. Holding medium constant, however, it is no more "efficient" to carve or build in one style rather than another; and it is thus largely futile to use stylistic traits as direct evidence of institutional structure. Their inherent variability, however, makes them invaluable for the reconstruction of history. Yet, the more expensive the medium, the more energy investment it represents, then the more information it can potentially convey concerning the state of the system if appropriate questions are asked. This is especially true in the case of architecture. Buildings are relatively expensive of capital, labor, materials, and organization-the sudden and discontinuously distributed appearance of construction in "foreign" style establishes not merely "foreign contact" as a historical event, but control from elsewhere of local capital and labor. Site intrusion of this type, while clearly a quantitative phenomenon, implies a particular dynamic of contact and suggests the most parsimonious explanation. Again, the more appropriate questions are not always asked, and the more traditional questions are not always appropriate. Parameters of scale and relative cost, and of the implications of building for questions of differential land-use and access to resources (cf. Proskouriakoff's [1963] study at Uaxactun, which documents an altered pattern of social stratification) are often somehow less "interesting" than questions of style, decoration, iconography and history. Settlement pattern (cf. Willey 1953), by the criteria already advanced, is almost a uniquely powerful data category, a virtual material isomorph of infrastructure and political economy, which records and preserves the most significant features of energy production and flow. Since Darwinian adaptation is by definition operationalized on grounds of population numbers and distributions, the paradigmatic mandate is direct and overwhelming. Despite the customary strictures concerning the use of negative evidence, one can say that what is not observable or reliably recoverable from this class of data was probably of negligible systemic importance. Because settlement pattern is a priori responsive to and reflective of selection pressures, the specifically historical information derived from it is tenuous. This class of evidence is subject to evolutionary processes of parallelism and convergence and explicable in terms of uniformitarianism rather distinction inherent rather in the questions most apthan strictly historical principles-a propriately asked than in the observations themselves. A number of basic assumptions already considered underlie the strategy of research. First is

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that population size is an index of energy capture (minimally each person is an additional energy packet)-that it reflects the productivity of resources actually, not potentially, exploited for the support of that population. The behavior of the exploiting species in conjunction with the characteristics of the habitat-not the habitat alone-defines the niche occupied. Human populations constitute a probable extreme in the biosphere in terms of the unusual range and flexibility of the niches they occupy. If "carrying capacity"-the point at which a population reaches an asymptote-is probably a constant for no species, it is still more obviously variable for man, and must be determined empirically. Second, population distribution is in turn a reliable index of resources actually exploited. Because people will work only as hard as they have to, communities will be located to maximize efficiency of resource utilization. Any consistent alteration of settlement location indicates a change in the costs and returns of alternative resource procurement strategies, the resources used, and the ways in which they are used. Just as any observed subsistence system represents an empirical compromise or a system of tradeoffs among frequently conflicting patterns of minimizing expenditure and maximizing return, a settlement pattern too is, in effect, a compromise comparably determined among parameters with often radically different demands. It may be a tautology to observe that the more complex the infrastructure, the more such compromises are reflected in the observed population distribution that represents their resolution. Such changes in settlement pattern therefore constitute primary evidence for the distinction of intensification (Boserup 1965) from shift in the mode of production (Harris 1980), and accordingly, for changes in political economy attributable to these infrastructural processes. In the Lowland Maya area, for example, despite consistent population increase from the earliest agricultural settlements to the end of the sequence, population distributions show little change in principle. The bulk of the population tends to reside preferentially in or near zones of sloping, well-drained, limestone-based soil; it seems safe to assume that such niches constituted the least-labor, highest-return, lowest-risk components of the habitat. This suggests a process of continuous intensification of production-on the model of Boserup's sequence. Communities found in other niches can be explained as having been forced there, at the cost of working harder, for lowered yields and probably higher risks. Throughout the Maya occupation the relative favorability of zones vis-a-vis each other, measured by relative demography, seems to remain essentially constant (Ford 1981). This suggests that while intensification of production was probably continuous, the component techniques never generated a shift in the mode of production, which would have altered relative productivity, comparative demography, and geopolitical relations among zones. When and where it occurs, a shift in the mode of production is documented on the basis of altered principles of settlement distribution, i.e., where the bulk of the population is living. Again, the rationale is that people tend to live where they make a living; any changes indicate changes in the relative productivity of different habitat niches, and therefore in the costs and probabilities of making a living. What Roosevelt (1980) observes on the Orinoco is an initial period of relative demographic stability followed by a rapid growth of population. Concomitant with the latter is a shift in site distribution in which most settlement comes to be concentrated in areas adjacent to the seasonally inundated floodplain. Given the differential growth and labor requirements of manioc and maize, respectively, a shift of staple from manioc to maize as the source of most of the society's calories is postulated. Such a shift would account parsimoniously for the entire complex of population growth and altered niche dominance relationships between floodplain and inland forest; indeed, the demographic changes constitute primary evidence for the shift in the mode of production. Discovery and placement in time of actual maize remains and associated processing tools confirm the hypothesis, but only with a caveat: they document the appearance of maize, but of themselves-and unlike the settlement evidence-cannot indicate the scope of the technoeconomic difference it made, and thus of the systemic impact. No alternative hypothesis accounts so well for these observations. Similarly, the shift of population during the Formative period in the Basin of Mexico (Sanders et

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al. 1979) from the zones of relatively abundant rainfall to the vicinity of permanent springs, accompanied by considerable demographic growth, documents a shift from rainfall-dependent to irrigated agriculture as the source of most calories produced. No explanation of these changes is so powerful as this one; correlatively, no documentation of a "hydraulic revolution" is so convincing. Despite confusion among investigators on this issue, the "origin" or first appearance of irrigation is analytically less significant than the point at which it comes to make a systemic difference. Discovery of actual canals incontrovertibly associated with the settlements in question would be a desirable confirmation of a proposition generated on what are actually much stronger grounds. Sociopolitical Models in Archaeology However controversial may be the use of a materialist strategy in the interpretation of infrastructure, far greater resistance is encountered in the domain of structure, and particularly with respect to political economy. Many investigators seem to consider these phenomena best explicable in terms of their own laws (Flannery 1972; Blanton 1978), and, furthermore, treat processes at this level as determinative of the infrastructure (Adams 1966; Conrad 1981). Part of the difficulty here may be traced to the deeply rooted tradition of Western thinking (itself meriting analysis) that intention and purpose affect outcomes-a position explicitly rejected by cultural materialism. One result of this widespread and uncritically held view is that even in the absence of independent evidence concerning such motives and beliefs-the situation that inevitably obtains in archaeology-no serious attempt is consistently made to develop cross-cultural and diachronic models based on processes that do leave ample traces of their operation. To the cultural materialist these latter are the more important systemically in any case: Why not look for causality where it is strongest? Exacerbating current conditions, of course, is the regrettable fact that most extant ethnographic models have tended to range from the irrelevant to the downright misleading, based as they are, if often inconsistently, on categories impossible to operationalize in etic terms. The general archaeological protest that there is no nonequivocal way to apply ethnographic models to archaeological observations is well taken: there's a reason for that. All too often the response is to avoid these questions as far as possible. When they are confronted in archaeology the impression is that the more "cultural" the model the less falsifiable it becomes. Perhaps if certain ethnographic descriptions are unconfirmable archaeologically there is something flawed in that ethnographic approach. Studies of social and political life have often focused on emic treatment, even of concepts capable of etic operationalization. In ethnography, where the necessary informant concurrence can be obtained, this option is epistemologically legitimate; there is no "need" to formulate an alternative option, no obvious limitation inherent in this one. An ethnographer can study leadership or decision-making directly and can adduce several concomitant lines of evidence for these phenomena; an archaeologist has no independent evidence of the processes involved and can only assume analogically that they must have correlated in some way with what he can observe (at this juncture he falls directly into the Intentional Fallacy). An ethnographer can present a series of "types," each defined on the basis of criteria of varying and often unjustified importance, often not coordinate with each other, and with no requirement that the same parameters be invoked throughout the taxonomy. The archaeologist despairs of the possibility of translating such criteria into usable form. It apparently occurs to neither that the entire operation might be misconceived and perhaps even futile. Yet, as the maximal material expression of the ultimately material processes of energy capture, flow, and expenditure, settlement patterns should reveal the significant features of political economy. Those features not so recoverable, regardless of the emphases of traditional literature, can safely be treated as secondary. Following the mandate of the paradigm, the questions that determine the ordering of data will necessarily be somewhat different. However, any similarities or differences of structure for which comparability or noncomparability of energy content and distribution can be cited should be clearly apparent. Institutional involvement, particularly with surplus above immediate consumption and replacement needs, is directly expressed materially. Low-energy, egalitarian societies are those which

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produce no such surplus; as a result their settlements lack significant civic architecture, and public spaces lack costly elaboration. Even where such societies regularly or seasonally comprise several communities, these nodes should differ only minimally among themselves, and any observed variability may be largely explained with reference to environmental variability. Settlements in the more favorable zones of a habitat should be larger, and overall densities will be higher than would be the case in more marginal niches; seasonally occupied settlements should resemble each other by season, or, more precisely, by principal resource base exploited. If no surplus is produced, of course, it cannot be spent or controlled differentially from one locus rather than another. Under such conditions, network ties among component communities would be nonhierarchic and, since such components are largely self-sufficient economically, the ties tend to be weak and nonsymbiotic, functioning primarily for the reduction of risk in crisis situations. For such activities consanguineal and affinal ties of kinship-which perform other work as well-are adequate and inexpensive to support. Any tendency to growth in the development of nonegalitarian institutions will be reflected in the increased physical size and complexity of the settlement network, i.e., in the degree to which site stratification is present. This is a quantitative criterion rather than a binary (present/absent) one and refers to the degree of contrast among network components in size, in elaborateness (cost) of civic construction and other building contents, and in local infrastructure-contrasts that reflect social, economic, and political differentiation among interacting communities. As is also the case for egalitarian patterns, the larger communities and densest populations will be found in the more productive parts of the habitat. But as socioeconomic inequality increases, this no longer explains the same proportion of the observed variability, and the impact of some additional parameter is suggested. What these differences reflect is the differential size and/or regularity of the surplus produced at and controlled from each node or level of node. It may be oWbserved, for example, that the Big-Man societies of New Guinea (Sahlins 1963), while incipiently ranked, show little site stratification; the villages in which Big-Men live may not be physically distinctive. Surpluses are small and irregular, and the status positions, correlatively, are achieved and somewhat ephemeral. In fact the degree of sociopolitical inequality is so slight that these networks look very egalitarian still. Assuming unchecked continuation of positive feedback mechanisms, surpluses increase, status positions become increasingly ascribed, and the communities in which ranked nodes live who control that surplus come to reflect the fact that more wealth flows through these loci and is spent there. What the civic construction is, in other words, is a means for removing surplus from circulation lest it through inflation come to act per se as a negative check on continued intensification of production; such architecture, then, is directly the energy amassed and expended on it. Both the production and expenditure of a surplus are adaptive behaviors (Price 1981). While it may be obvious that continued or enhanced production is adaptive, this quality is less immediately apparent in the case of maintaining spending. But, societies removing surplus from circulation, whatever the motives or rationales for doing so, would continue to prosper with a higher probability than those not adopting such practices. The latter would be more likely to stabilize at lower demographic and energetic levels, as negative feedback mechanisms act to check continued surplus production. Ranked institutions and the economics of surplus are linked in a positive feedback loop; such institutions are intimately involved in the control and allocation of both capital and labor, especially the latter. In any case, natural selection can operate only upon the on-theground consequences of expressed behaviors, regardless of whatever decision-making processes and "information" may be attendant on those behaviors. Reference to surplus and its expenditure permits a materialist perspective on the ceremonialism noted by Service (1962) as characteristic of ranked societies-a perspective, moreover, capable of explaining the observation that the ceremonialism is variable in its occurrence. Its absence does not imply that the society is developing through some distinct evolutionary trajectory of its own (cf. Sanders and Webster 1978)-merely that in some contexts there is some other way to spend that surplus. While all societies that produce a surplus face the problem of spending it, in some technoenvironmental contexts there is another potentially profitable option: it can be

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reinvested to produce more energy. The extent to which this is possible or profitable must be determined empirically. In the Basin of Mexico, surplus was invested in the technology of production to address a limiting factor: the construction and expansion of irrigation works, in which increased productivity was effectively a function of increased labor investment. By contrast, this sort of reinvestment in the Lowland Maya area could not have enhanced agricultural productivity (it would, rather, have accelerated degradation), would have had a low, even a negative, payoff. Correlatively, elaborate ceremonialism, so marked among the Maya, is comparatively undeveloped in Formative Central Mexico. Determination of the extent to which a society is nonegalitarian depends thus on the analysis of regional settlement pattern (cf. Wilson 1981) and on the degree of internal differentiation and contrast noted within the network as a whole. Entire networks, characterized in this fashion, can be compared with each other along a number of relevant dimensions. If total demographic size is a convenient index of overall energy content, population distribution reflects the manner in which it is produced and spent. While site stratification can be broadly represented as a pyramid, each such pyramid may differ from others in size, shape, and height (number of levels or size classes of settlement, of energy-processing nodes). Comparison of the numbers of settlements in each size class and the percentage of population accounted for by each is thus a basic step in comparing political economies. Surplus production per network can be indexed by the costs of all nonresidential construction from all nodes at all levels; its expenditure by the per level ratio of civic to residential building. As a shorthand technique, furthermore, it is legitimate to compare the sizes and costs of the apical settlements, or even of the civic sector of each, from one pyramidal network to another. Each of these dimensions of comparison provides an index of a somewhat different energetic determinant of political economy; taken together these can provide operational statements of the degree of similarity or difference of scale and form. It must be remembered that this sort of concerted strategy, despite the quantity of settlement data recorded since Willey's work in 1953, is rarely implemented systematically. One gets the impression that voluminous settlement observations are all too frequently made almost without quite knowing why, without putting them to work. A number of subsidiary observations, equally material but involving smaller energy quanta, can be used to supplement or refine the generalizations developed thus far. Many of these entail relatively traditional types of archaeological observation and description which are, however, only inconsistently applied to this sort of question or are applied piecemeal with no concept of the differential weight of evidence. Sumptuary goods-recognizable as such on the basis of their not only objets d'art, but reflect increasing relative infrequency and restricted associations-are differentiation of social status of individuals, households, or entire settlements. Vivian (1970) notes, for instance, that most occurrences of turquoise, elaborate burials, and comparable status indications are in the large "town sites" of Chaco Canyon, not in the smaller settlements. Town sites are independently defined on the basis of multistory apartment residences and great kivas-and are situated to control runoff that feeds a floodwater irrigation system. The shell armbands and necklaces of the Trobriands would delineate a status residence, not otherwise significantly differentiated physically. These goods circulate only among ranked nodes. Interments accompanied by sumptuaries should contrast with those lacking them-an index that can be used to generate and confirm additional observations. To the extent, for example, that status is ascribed rather than achieved, the probability is increased that status burials will contrast with simpler ones in various demographic and physical characteristics-stature, diet, morbidity, mortality-attributable to the fact that better-off households eat better and can afford to feed even unproductive young children well (a group most often scanted when food is scarce) (cf. Gross and Underwood 1971; Peebles and Kus 1977; Schoeninger 1979; Storey 1980). The foregoing supports the strategy advocated in the preceding section, that ranking and stratification be treated in terms of a continuum rather than a contrast. Differences in stature and in life table that are strongly correlated with other material evidence of differential status certainly approach the "differential access to basic resources" criterion of stratification. There are few resources more basic than food, and the most parsimonious, nonidiosyncratic, nonquixotic ex-

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planation of differential feeding of children by social status, regardless of the (unrecoverable) accompanying ideology, is that not everyone can afford to allocate expensive, high-quality foods to other than active, producing adults. In those ranked societies in which redistribution is prominent (not all of them, cf. Price [1981]), ranked nodes clearly have preferential access to whatever resources are obtained through the redistributive system. The comparative physical anthropology suggests that more than merely sumptuaries is increasingly involved. Only one set of behaviorscapital control of the factors of production-remains to be added, and the principles by which it develops are the same ones applicable to preceding steps (cf. also Harris [1977:Chapter 7]). Degree of such control-not presence or absence-is manifested materially in the differentiation of residences, the principal reflection of the ability of a household to divert community surplus to private use. Very large, internally complex ranked societies should indeed resemble stratified ones, on the basis of descriptive criteria derived from energetic parameters and consistently applied across the energetic spectrum. Strategies of Retrodiction Some archaeologists seem to reject in principle the use of ethnographic data for the reconstruction of archaeologically manifested structure and superstructure (viz. the position that archaeology "requires its own theory" in order to address these problems at all). Others, on the other hand, appear to invoke ethnographic data quite readily and uncritically. In a sense the former group may be viewed as a response to the excesses of the latter. This paper maintains that retrodiction from ethnography is normal and necessary-is indeed implicit in even the most purely "archaeological" formulation. Therefore, it is preferable to develop rules of procedure governing the translation of ethnographic observation into archaeological evidence. While some inferences and retrodictions are reliable, valid, and as amenable to testing as any proposition however generated, others are flatly illegitimate. More than mere seat-of-the pants intuition is necessary for evaluation of the relative probabilities of analogically derived propositions, and in the distinction of some as productive from others as logically impermissible. Common assumptions to the contrary, greater knowledge of ethnography is insufficient to develop or strengthen an analogy. The facts do not speak for themselves, do not generate a research strategy, and cannot substitute for the role of a paradigm. A powerful and logically sound far analogy-the only kind that is potentially useful to archaeologists or anyone else-depends less upon "the facts" that upon what is imposed on them by the investigator. Analogical statements constitute merely a special case of what is more broadly termed the comparative method-a special case which, when one member of the comparison is drawn from archaeology or history, nonetheless requires certain logical procedures distinctive to it. Because the uniformitarian principle mandates treatment of past and present within the same causal framework, there is no inherent problem of legitimacy in such diachronic comparison. As is regularly the case with the comparative method, the similarities on which comparisons are drawn can be of there is no reany sort-formal or functional; technological, sociological, or ideological-and quirement of homology. There may be a stipulation that the members of the comparison be historically or linguistically related (the "genetic model" of Romney [1957] and Vogt [1964]); for criticism of analogies so formulated see Price [1980]); or the analogy may be constructed on other grounds specified by the investigator (what Charlton [1981] calls "general" analogy). Not unexpectedly, the consequences of these various options will differ in both practical applicability and epistemological strength. Some illegitimate attempts have tended to discredit the entire undertaking; part of the reason may be that the role of paradigm is insufficiently taken into account. Some investigators reject the utility of analogical reasoning on grounds that it cannot help to interpret any phenomenon truly extinct without issue, i.e., without precise surviving ethnographic parallel. One possible instance of such a situation may be the general absence of extant or ethnohistorically reported ranked societies at the uppermost pole of the continuum so designated-a gap that admittedly contributes to the difficulty of interpreting this "level." But it is this scale and form of sociopolitical organization that would compete most directly with states (Price

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1981)-a competition likely to result in either secondary state formation (Price 1978) or tribalization (Fried 1975). While there are reasons for selection against these examples, given a changed systemic context that includes states, there is no bar in principle to analysis of their institutions on the basis of the material effects they have produced, and of the similarity or difference among such effects in comparison with better-documented examples. At least in the past half century, this type of objection has not unduly troubled paleontology, even when that discipline has confronted comparable difficulties. This has probably been because paleontology can deal with functional similarities and has not found it necessary to demand formal identities. Despite Gould's reservations concerning analogical reasoning (1980), Charlton (1981) correctly notes that his use of "anomaly" is a subclass of such reasoning. His specification of comparison based on comparability of adaptive context and of traits directly linked to it, moreover, neither contrasts with nor substitutes for an analogical argument, as he implies; rather, it represents the imposition of conditions under which analogy is likely to be most powerful (cf. Mitchell 1980). It is not accidental that these are the conditions that a cultural materialist would also specify. An analogical proposition takes the general form If AThen A1 -

B
B1.

When both members of the comparison are drawn from ethnography, all four terms-A, B, A1, Bl-are directly observable, and the causal linkages can be postulated independently of each other and relatively directly. If one member derives from history or archaeology, one term, usually A1, cannot be so observed and must be reconstructed from its presumed consequences B1. In such examples the cause-effect linkage must be demonstrated independently for the second member, apart from the A - B link. Some statement of equivalences-that A and only A causes B (granted that this is necessarily a probabilistic statement)-is required for the diachronic analogy (Price 1980). Much of "experimental archaeology" represents a controlled effort to establish such an equivalence, to link A1 causally and independently to B1. If the paradigmatically significant components of behavior are those most involved in energy flow, and if these in turn are those most likely to leave material traces, then examination of both the behavior A and its consequences B in the present constitutes the necessary first step. Next is the specification of the material similarities between B and Bi: to the extent that these two terms resemble each other the probability is enhanced that A and A1 will be similar to a comparable extent: the nature and magnitude of a cause are reflected in the nature and magnitude of the effect. An additional requisite to legitimacy is the following: however generated, both members of a comparison must be treated from the standpoint of the same research strategy. If facts themselves are neither emic nor etic, the means by which they are verified or falsified are one or the other. Unless both members are comparably treated there can be no consistent or noneclectic means of falsification; cross-strategy analogies are necessarily illegitimate. Since many aspects of much contemporary ethnography rely so strongly on an emic strategy, analogy cannot be used to underwrite retrodiction of these observations into a past, which requires use of an etic canon of proof. In the case of ideology, for which few etic studies are extant, the problem is particularly acute; this, paradoxically, is where many investigators seem most to wish to retrodict from analogy. Largely in the past half dozen years (but cf. Wauchope [1938]), the recent subfield of ethnoarchaeology (e.g., Gould 1978; Kramer 1979)-actually an emerging etic ethnography that is at least implicitly materialist in strategy-has begun to address certain of the broader questions of the relations of ethnology and archaeology. Directed to the development of canons of proof independent of informant concurrence, this "school" consistently addresses the problem of the A B linkage and the reconstruction of the A1 term. The specific substantive or culture-historical implications of the work are less significant to the present discussion than certain metatheoretical

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and logical considerations; these, rather than the recovery of exact or literal counterparts between present and past, appear to be its principal contribution thus far. Although some studies, notably the Tucson Garbage Project (Rathje 1978, 1979), deal with complex neotechnic society, most have focused upon hunter-gatherers (e.g., Yellen [1977] on the San, Binford [1978] on the Nunamiut, Gould [1980] on the Australian Western Desert). The opportunity to explore the relationship of emic to etic interpretation in the most direct form possible has not been overlooked: this ought to be more generally a central research priority in contemporary anthropology. In part coordinately, in part convergently, and regardless of whether the kinship is explicitly acknowledged, the research foci and strategies of ethnoarchaeology are strikingly congruent with the cultural-materialist paradigm. CONCLUSIONS In this review of the principles of cultural materialism the paradigm has been tested against selected competitors in the analysis of certain problems of similarity and difference, stability and change in cultural systems. Because there is no absolute or immutable truth in science, a comparative testing of this sort is the only valid method of establishing the relative strength of competing sets of explanatory premises: theoretical propositions must be tested against each other as well as against data and evaluated on metatheoretical as well as empirical grounds. Facts do not speak for themselves, nor does generalization inhere in them; they acquire significance-indeed are recognized as facts-only insofar as some theoretical framework is imposed on them. Thus, no statement of causality can be expected to emerge through the amassing of facts, no matter how assiduous or "complete." Thus, too, the present treatment of substantive controversies (often, and not accidentally, "big" ones that cross subfield or discipline boundaries) has been deliberately restricted to those facets immediately related to the selected theoretical points under examination, with no intention or attempt to present these debates in full, far less to resolve them. A synthesis of the principle of the causal primacy of the infrastructure (Marx) with the operational mechanism of natural selection (Darwin), the two linked by a common energetic criterion, offers a nonidiosyncratic foundation for the widest possible cross-cultural and diachronic comparison. That this fusion has characterized the position since its inception is manifest in its consistent emphasis on the costs of/returns from the behaviors it investigates (but cf. Adams [1981]). Several consequences may be noted. First, comparison of formally or descriptively quite dissimilar behaviors according to uniform and consistent standards of measurement is not only permitted but mandated. Such procedures, while they often necessitate the recasting of a number of traditional anthropological questions into unconventional forms, may at the same time generate new and potentially productive research strategies capable of revealing unsuspected systemic interrelationships. Ideology, for example (cf. also Adams [1981]), is thus treated on the basis of the systemic work it performs rather than as an autonomous, much less a determinative, domain; like subsistence behavior and sociopolitical institutions, it incurs potentially quantifiable costs and equally operationalizable returns. Second, and consonant with the role of any paradigm in the direction of research and the establishment of rules of evidence, cultural materialism sets forth an operationalized hierarchy of relative importance. Behaviors demonstrably more heavily and intimately involved in the capture and utilization of greater amounts of total energy are to that extent treated as of greater systemic importance. Although substantive identification of these behaviors in any given system is necessarily empirical, designation of these criteria of significance is a theoretical operation. It follows therefore that a research focus on the character of the infrastructure, the technoeconomy of production, is paradigmatically justified, with no need to postulate an "opposition" of Marx and differential energetics; despite differences of terminology, the principal points of each can be expressed in terms of the other without noticeable distortion. A related epistemological consequence with particular, if hardly exclusive, impact upon the subfield of archaeology is that behaviors and processes recognized as differentially important are those most likely to leave material traces of their operation-matter and energy are convertible, and material expression is

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in large part a function of energy cost. Adoption of this paradigm (in contrast with the idealist competitors currently flourishing as the green bay tree in cultural anthropology) obviates the difficulties that would otherwise confront a field unable in principle to recover directly the information that underwrites major causal statements. Moreover, this application offers to cultural anthropology a continuous corrective check (analogous perhaps to selection pressure?) on its own formulations: if the latter are unintelligible, i.e., make no sense, in an archaeological context, if they are in principle unfalsifiable in such a context (practical problems aside), then the probability increases that they are incorrect or incorrectly derived. Finally, the principle of natural selection offers a consistent strategy for addressing the problem of history. Since at least the work of Boas there has been a basic assumption, sometimes overt, sometimes tacit, itself of paradigmatic status in American anthropology, that history per se constitutes an explanans; from a Darwinian standpoint it clearly becomes an explanandum. Selection pressure operates upon energy efficiency differentials under stated circumstances, leading to the differential survival and reproduction of some variants at the expense of less efficient competitors that do comparable work: this premise explains nonteleologically why historical sequences come to look the way they do. Much current archaeological work, especially in the collection and interpretation of data, seems impressionistically to be sufficiently culture-historical in emphasis to suggest that the principal competition of paradigms in that subfield is still between historicism and one or another form of materialism. Kohl's assertion (1981) of the present dominance of materialism-even when his reference is inclusive of all materialist positions taken overoptimistic, or at best premature. Even when not directly expressed, the together-appears traditional archaeological preoccupation with the discovery of origins-an essentially historical still a major concern. Yet, as is also the case in biology, question of how variation arises-seems an evolutionary theory cannot legitimately or falsifiably address this question. These distinctions, of course, reflect the difference of focus of cultural materialism in comparison with alternative and rather more orthodox materialist positions. By a process perhaps analogous to the evolution of productive regimes, scientific paradigms themselves evolve; should they fail to do so they become ossified into dogma and are eventually relegated quite legitimately to the status of intellectual curiosities-in effect, selected against. A "scientific revolution" in this sense analytically resembles a shift in the mode of production that redresses, if temporarily, certain energetic inefficiencies and imbalances in the system in which it occurs. If such a shift is successful (survives and spreads) it undergoes intensification (more people working harder). The new paradigm, if successful, comes to generate a "normal science," with increasing numbers of researchers investigating an increasing range of problems and emphasizing different aspects of the initial premises. Given the positive feedback mechanisms applicable to the description and analysis of any changing conditions in any sphere of behavior, this new work will act to modify the initial premises, to expand their scope and refine the strategies they entail, to stimulate yet additional research. Because too-even if metaphorically-such developments are regular and evolutionary, processes of parallelism and convergence can be expected, and, in the case of cultural materialism, are already evident (cf. Adams 1981). While nearly all paradigmatic "revolutions" in science have traditionally been associated with particular individuals (tectonic plate theory comes to mind as a possible exception in this respect), all have outgrown their own founders. It is amusing to wonder whether Newton would have recognized Newtonian physics ca. 1895, or Darwin, what contemporary evolutionary biology has become. Yet it is not frivolous to note the limitations-the rather odd sort of fundamentalism-of treating any paradigm-level generalization as merely "the lengthened shadow of one man." If a paradigm does not grow and develop, does not in this sense adapt, it is not science but theology. Cultural materialism in 1981, or even in 1979, is accordingly-pace Heraclitus-not "the same" position it was in 1968; nor will it be in 1990 what it is as this is written in 1981. Acknowledgments. My apologies to the reader, to whomI have presented an extended body of dense and as not entirely tractable material, much of it as alien to most of my colleagues in cultural anthropology it will doubtlessbe to mostarchaeologists.Because the positionadvancedis a controversialone, care has been taken

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to present its tenets in as closely and carefully reasoned a manner as possible, with a clear and overt statement of the strong biases inherent in the presentation. If the treatment of archaeological theory should be weighed in the balance and found wanting, the reader is reminded that I have only indirect ties to archaeology-affinal, rather than consanguineal ties, as it were. The depiction-the view of an outsider looking in-is probably representative of the assessment held more or less in common among at least those cultural anthropologists who consider these questions at all. To the extent that it appears skewed or dated, it reflects the apparent inability of the two subfields to address each other even when they address common problems. Without both the truculence and the good offices of Scotty MacNeish this paper would not have been written. He is not to blame, however, either for its length (although I guess he should have known) or for its contents (with much of which he in fact disagrees). My thanks also to Dena Dincauze, editor of American Antiquity, for extending an invitation to a paper rather beyond the customary purview of the journal, for her welcome assistance and encouragment during its preparation, and for her indulgence as it grew inexorably into a Dunwich Horror. Several conversations with David Post on evolutionary theory have found their way into this paper, in forms that I hope will not unduly discomfit him. I am grateful to Guy Oakes for comment and criticism that have strengthened the treatment of philosophy of science; even where I have overridden his advice, he has helped to rescue me from the toils of arguments long superseded. For the organization of the body of the paper I appreciate the strong prompting of Janet Edmondson and Jagna Wojcicka-Sharff. Additional suggestions have come from Robert Carneiro, Carol Henderson, Tim Knab, William Mitchell, Robert Murphy, David Nugent, Mary Odell, and Jane Bennett Ross. I get by with a little help from my friends. Needed assistance with the specifically archaeologically contents of this paper has come from a number of people who, even where they have disagreed with me and may be bemused at the context in which they now find themselves, were patient enough to read the earlier draft. Regardless of whether it shows-and it may not-I've learned from their discussions and comments, and from the papers they have sent me: Thomas Charlton, Timothy Earle, Frank Findlow, Anabel Ford, Neil Goldberg, Sydne Marshall, James Nolan, William Rathje, Evelyn Rattray, Anna Roosevelt, William Sanders, Michael Schiffer, Gordon Willey. Any theoretical position develops in response to criticism from outside itself. Therefore, perhaps ironically, I wish to thank the legions of critics attracted by this position as it has matured since the middle 1960s. Many points they have raised-in conversation and in print-are countered in this paper; they are "real" in the sense that all have been encountered in the course of "fieldwork." Our critics have indicated to cultural materialists that we too may not always communicate very effectively. However necessary, any thanks to Marvin Harris are all too insufficient: he should in fact have written this. Both the contents of this paper and its overall strategy are a tribute to his influence; many if not most of its major points reflect the extent to which, over the years, his thinking has formed mine. REFERENCES CITED Adams, Richard N. 1975 Energy and structure: a theory of social power. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1981 Natural selection, energetics, and "cultural materialism." Current Anthropology 22:603-624. 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