by Hugh M. Lewis

A model of eco-cultural evolution is developed which claims that for most of human prehistory, a distinctive patterning of cultural development occurred in which small groupings existed in basic ecological competition with one another, either directly or indirectly competing for natural resource domains. Cultural adaptations provided cultural groupings the capacity to overcome and succeed in the basic evolutionary imperatives of reproduction and productive survival. In the long run, cultural groupings that failed to meet these challenges were eventually "selected out" while other groups that succeeded experienced population growth and expansion of the cultural areas, and development of the cultural configuration into a more complex and differentiated system of relations. Thus cultural groupings exhibited in time a unique cultural configuration of traits that served as a reproductive and resource boundary, and thus served as a kind of sub-species grouping. Alternative cultural development thus was analogous to sympatric speciation. The human evolution of cultural groupings was therefore very similar in form and function to the natural evolution of species. Groups that achieved basic cultural innovations and significant breakthroughs in designs and devices of cultural adaptation, achieved greater adaptive success than other groupings. Under appropriate ecological conditions of relative environmental stability and isolation, cultural groupings could achieve a relative level of equilibrium of adaptation that tended, like traditional conservativism, to resist significant changes to the configuration of cultures or to the manner of environmental adaptation. The cultural information, or knowledge, required for a system to achieve adaptive success was transmitted from generation to generation, and was also transmitted horizontally through processes of transculturative interaction. Groups could be absorbed by other groups, and the cultural information of one system can become integrated into the cultural system of another group, albeit in a selective manner. Cultural selection was an important mechanism, parallel to natural selection, that served to intermediate human relationships with the environment, with other social groups and between the members of a group.

The basis for a model of cultural evolution is to explain the rise of human groups or social formations as competing organizations of population across a natural landscape. Early cultural groupings would have become adapted to various trophic niche-profiles or configurations upon a natural landscape, and would possibly have come into competition for one another for basic resources, access to certain zones or ranges of land or eco-diversity, and this competition would have had several different kinds of outcomes that would have subsequently affected the course of human social development. Competition between human groups would have been both direct and indirect, especially when two groups exhibit very similar trophic-niche profiles and occupied the same or overlapping regions. It could have led to warfare patterns, and alternatively to the establishment of certain patterns of trade and reciprocal exchange by which the possibilities of conflict could have been mediated.

In its simplest sense, a model of cultural evolution presumes that human group formations were significant at an early stage of human evolutionary development, that such group formations were corporate and relatively long lasting affairs, and that they achieved early on some sense of cultural integration. The initial presupposition is that early human adaptations were so successful that it led to a rapid saturation of any environments occupied by human populations. New innovations would have possibly opened new niches and ranges of adaptation, and any vacuum that may have occurred upon the prehistoric landscape would have been rapidly filled in by other peoples.

The analogy is to compare different cultural group formations, and their associated and emergent traditions, with the emergence of different species of biological life-forms, all competing or at least interacting with one another for survival. Cultural systems would come into contact and possible cooperation or competition with other systems for what can be defined as scarce and limited natural resources. There would have been enough similarity between different human cultural systems such that anytime they did come into contact, there would have been a sense of competition involved, and the general ecological principle of competitive exclusion would have been the general rule. To a great extent, in regionally saturated frameworks, eco-cultural differentiation into different and to some measure mutually complementary eco-trophic niche profiles, would be expected to have occurred. Niche diversification and expansion would be expected such that there would tend to be the exclusion of marginal groups to marginal zones of adaptation. Groups that could not compete with others would be rapidly replaced or otherwise marginalized from prime habitat. A part of this intergroup competition would have been expressed in terms of patterns of warfare and aggression between groups. Alternatively it would have been expressed in terms of economic variables.

It could be expected that groupings would sort themselves out onto landscapes in such a way as to maximize the distances and spacing between them and to minimize the competitive overlap between two such groupings. If overlap occurred, some form of conflict and resolution would be expected as an eventual outcome. Warfare may have been a basic and chronic part of human existence time immemorial. As a result of such competition, it can be expected that on occasion, some groups would be forced to migrate to new areas, where the chances of success would be even less. Some groups would fail, and other groups would succeed. Groups that failed would either become extinct as effective systems, or else become swamped or absorbed in time by a larger and more successful system. Such patterns would have been especially marked in areas of high ecological diversity and density that would have been capable of sustaining larger numbers of people.

Human intraspecific competition, when carried on upon the group level, would have become something similar in form and outcome to normal interspecific competition between different species. Those cultural groupings who could achieve a degree of adaptive flexibility and group solidarity than other groupings, would tend to have an adaptive advantage over other groupings.

For most of human prehistory, patterns of warfare and political conflict between competing groups would have been of relatively low-intensity affairs that might involve only a handful or at most a hundred or occasionally a thousand combatants at any one time, and probably only a few deaths. Intensity of conflict increases with sedentarism and the rise of population densities and the greater carrying-capacities that secondary cultural adaptations afforded to people. Such warfare would have been regulated to a great extent by ritual and magical institutions that would serve to reduce the risk and the cost of waging warfare. It may have taken the form of raiding for slaves or for religious purposes, such as coming of age fulfillment or a fulfilling the prophecy of a dream quest. The punctuation of ritually regulated warfare, as is ethnographically documented in the New Guinea highlands, by episodes of secularly motivate warfare that will involve a higher degree of bloodletting and violence, would be an expected pattern in any warfare system.

Warfare therefore would have tended to produce optimal spacing arrangements between groups, and would have provided a mechanism by which "safe distances" between peoples could be judged and maintained.

It may be difficult to demonstrate in the archaeological record one way or another whether such warfare patterns ever played part in the distribution and patterning of cultures on the human landscape, but from the standpoint of a systems perspective such a model fits the expected outcomes of cultural development, and is almost demanded by an extension of other models to a regional or interregional framework. There is no reason to think that patterns of human violence and warfare are only the earmarks of modern civilization, and that human nature has not always had a dark sided proclivity towards violent pursuit of self interest at the expense of other people. If this is attributing modern kinds of motivations to lost and ancient peoples, perhaps the table can be turned around, and we can attribute to modern "civilized" human beings what are in fact primitive and very basic motivations that relate to the efficacy of the use of violent force to achieve one's goals.

Some kind of warfare pattern could be expected even in contexts in which the distribution of people upon a landscape was fairly sparse and spread out and eco-trophically differentiated and variegated. In fact, some form of conflict could be expected whenever and where ever the possibility existed for more peaceful exchange and acculturative, or transculturative contact, between different groups of people.

The basis for this argument is that human nature, by virtue of its cultural adaptation, has achieved a state of "world openness" that can be defined by its "unfinished business" in terms of the internal regulatory mechanisms of human behavior. Regulation of human behavior in appropriate response sets and relational configurations with other people depend upon the capacity of cultural acquisition and shared traits or constraints. That these patterns, ultimately adaptation in their functional and evolutionary purpose, are most often far from perfectly fit to their natural circumstances. It follows that cultural regulatory mechanisms, however internalized, occasionally, in fact, quite frequently, break down. The result is not a human animal that is, like any predatory, out for its next meal. Rather it is in reality a kind of animal without any instinctual controls at all, that is run amok or rabid. It is in reality like a human monster that knows no boundaries or limits to its own destructive behavior.

The rise of human cultural development and of human systems is centrally tied to the mechanisms involved in cultural mediation of the natural environment, particularly in relation to adaptive capacities and natural selection pressures upon human populations. These were made possible by the adaptive and functional organization of a complex brain around a host of uniquely human or anthropomorphic traits. I have defined this basic organization of brain function to be the basis for human symbolization, and the resulting patterns of cultural mediation of the environment are fundamentally therefore mechanism of symbolic mediation that permit the organization of experience to achieve information and knowledge about the world.

Cultural mediation deals essentially with a primary function of culture in human reality, and that is to mediate the experience of reality upon all levels of our being and our adaptive functioning. Our dependency upon culture, and what can be called our social and symbolic dependency, are the consequence of our evolutionary reliance upon the mediational function of culture in our adaptive response patterning to environmental stimuli and cues. As a consequence of this evolutionary development in human systems, there occurred a continuous course of symbolic transformation of human reality, both externally in the objective material world, and internally in the noetic organization of human consciousness. This transformed the world as it transformed our experience and view of the world, and this transformation was culturally mediated, and to the extent that cultural patterning has been historically, and I would contend, evolutionarily variable, it has led to different consequences for different groups of people in the world.

From this standpoint, simple stone tools were among the first symbolic objects to be made, used and carried by human beings, and they reflected and reinforced a basic change in the relationship that Human beings carried on with their natural environment, for they permitted adaptation and problem solving, the primary function of natural symbolisms, in complex environmental settings. The use of tools and cultural traits invariably facilitated and promoted human survival. As cultural patterns developed, these complexes permitted a niche diversification and the capacity to adapt to a broad range of environmental contexts. As humans succeeded in an evolutionary sense through cultural adaptations, a natural and expected outcome would be the significant increase in human populations and total human biomass represented in the biosphere. Cultural patterning arose in an evolutionary context. It would not have been permitted within an evolutionary framework if it did not confer an adaptive trait configuration and positive selective advantage within the effective environment of the first hominid populations. Culture therefore was an emergent property of human evolutionary adaptation that was tied to the human brain and a host of related morphological traits. As a result, it succeeded in permitting humans a degree of evolutionary success unrealized by any other organism. It permitted humans not only to span a broad range of niches, but to occupy as well multiple trophic levels.

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Cultural selection has been a key factor influencing the evolution of human culture, as it has been a leading or even determining variable in the complex of positive selectional factors that promoted human development. Cultural selection permitted human groups to achieve a form of systemic integration, or rather a functional integration, that came to characterize the configuration of cultural patterning, that was not otherwise possible. This pattern that was the result of cultural integration permitted cultural groupings to function independently in the world as if a unique kind of species, without the necessary genetic trait alterations that would be naturally required for comparable kinds of adaptations in nature. In other words, through cultural selection, a form of non-genetic or phenotypic integration of information was achieved at a superorganic level of human group dynamics, that permitted people to adopt species-specific behavioral and trait complexes. Because these characteristics, not genes, but phemes, which were basically symbolic in structure, and became increasingly linguistic in expression, were primarily phenotypical and not genotypically determined, a function of human phenotypic trait plasticity, they could be acquired environmentally and transmitted horizontally between people. It entail that groups could therefore acquire new cultural trait patterns without having to be genetically preprogrammed for such trait acquisition. It entailed as well the human beings could in fact cross the culture-species barrier in more ways than one, and that cultural patterning could be both back-borrowed and amalgamated--an impossibility for naturally divergent genetic systems.

Human cultural and symbolic integration that has been achieved is not a deterministic or static form of integration. It permits and promotes human adaptability to continuously fluctuating environmental conditions. Such integration made possible the organization of energy and information in human cultural groupings to achieve through cooperative and collective efforts what would otherwise have been impossible. Humans adopted uniquely human characteristics of intra-group organization and cooperation that were unlike that of any other social species--they were not ants or termites in a colony, or musk-ox in a herd, or a pod of dolphins or a pack of wolves. They were not even a troop of baboons or a group of forest Chimpanzees. The most we can expect from such comparison is mere superficial analogy.

Thus, human cultural systems were never completely or totally integrated, and politically and structurally speaking, these forms of integration have taken varying forms over time. The most typical form seems to be one that can be characterized as "authoritarian" of one kind or another, and these authoritarian forms usually represent the hierarchical class stratification between groups within a social boundary. It also reflects I believe a preoccupation of human beings with power and the control over social resources. There is a tendency in any system for there to emerge a competition over complete power, and usually, there occurs some "alpha" that achieves, at least temporarily, relative dominance in the system.

It has been important in human adaptation that cultural systems are never highly integrated, because the partial integration of such systems is the key factor of their adaptive flexibility and long term success. Relatively structured, "totalitarian" systems, tend to be inflexible, and to fail in the long run. They suffer inherently the problem of the politics of power, of the internal succession of leadership.

The basis for the model of cultural anthropogenesis, transculturation, and eco-cultural development of systems, is a basic human evolutionary process that I refer to as cultural selection. Cultural selection is related to the Darwinian term "natural selection" and can be defined therefore as the culturally ordered process of human interference with their natural surroundings. Hunting is an example of cultural selection. We can understand it from a subsistence standpoint as a form of predation and food-getting. But hunting can also involve institutionalized forms of activity that have little or nothing to do with food-getting strategies. Hunters probably often killed other predators as a form of interspecific competition, especially to prevent predation upon themselves. Foraging and browsing really is a form of faunal predation. Fishing is an alternate example of cultural selection. We can say that the domestication of plants and animals has involved consistently patterns of cultural selection which has led to the functional modification of many types of plants and animals to increase their efficiency or utility for human beings. It involved the stampeding of animals into weirs or corrals, netting, trapping, etc. Modifications of the natural environment, by burning, construction, technological innovations, industry, can also result in disturbance of habitat. Furthermore, cultural selection patterns are exhibited indirectly by means of human populational pressures upon the landscape. People acted in a deliberated and concerted manner to modify their environments to their own adaptive advantage. They may have used fires, clearing of forest areas or patches, the construction of shelters, and the making of paths by which to render their environment more predictable and therefore more secure.

Unlike natural selection, which often occurs as a result of chance or stochastic design of natural systems, and is at all points regulated in animals by instinctive behavior, cultural selection invariably involves processes of cultural mediation that includes deliberate planning and goal seeking behavior, use of techniques and tools to increase efficiency and reduce risk associated with such ventures. These are characteristics of human culture that are associated with experiential learning, exploration, trial and error, goal seeking and problem solving intelligence. They are also characteristics relating fundamentally to a symbolic form of cognitive patterning, and to the process of communication of information and sharing and coordination of cultural forms and social behavior. It took the form eventually of natural human language, a characteristic unique to humans for which trait complex humans have evolved into. It took the form of a distinctive style of social patterning as well that was centered on three interrelated complexes: human sexuality; human aggression; and human socialization based upon postponed ontogenetic development and maturation. Prolonged ontogenetic maturation favored in particular larger brains and increasing intelligence in the direction of abstract reasoning and creative imagination. It was a necessary evolutionary outcome of a big brain that required longer periods of post-natal development and cultural-environmental conditioning.

Cultural selection as a significant influence upon human evolution and cultural development, tended to render human adaptation increasingly independent of genetic, instinctive, natural environmental constraints, and forms of natural selection, to just the extent that it rendered human beings fundamentally dependent upon cultural mediation and enculturation to achieve successful adaptation. It has tended to lift humankind from its evolutionary niche and the constraints of natural biological process, and has resulted in the capacity of humankind to systematically, and increasingly, circumvent or else exert a new form of control upon their natural environment.

The evolutionary model has been heavily emphasized as a theoretical framework for explaining human cultural development and social patterning. Ecological explanations make greater sense than pure sociobiological, biocultural and evolutionary explanations that posit invariably some kind of deterministic connection between human genetics and cultural patterning and social organization, and even human mental patterning. Evolution and genetics does account for the rise and development of the morphological trait patterns that are on a basic level associated with human culture--big brains, etc. But these patterns by themselves do not explain in a sufficient manner the cultural behavior and patterning that occurs as a result of the action of this trait complex in its natural or culturally mediated environment. Once cultural patterning was initiated as a result of this complex, it came to increasingly influence itself, creating its own selective conditioning favoring trait development towards greater capacity in culture-trait acquisition.

Cultural mediation that was the result of this process succeeded in unhooking human beings from the constraints of nature. It created what is known as "world openness" for the human species whose subsequent behavior was not strictly determined by genetics, but increasingly by phenotypic expression and environmental modifications. Cultural mediation therefore created its own set of built-in constraints, and became thereby a feedback system such that culturally modified environmental conditions served as the basis for constraining further human evolution and ontogenetic development. Human beings capable of realizing culturally based traits on average probably succeeded better than individuals who were less capable. There must have been at this stage an early form of intraspecific competition between humans and between groups of human beings. Such competition fostered the sociality and social conditioning of human beings, favoring affiliation with larger and larger groups that came into increasing environmental competition with one another.

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Achieved cultural integration of a human system entails that a cultural grouping will attain a kind of steady-state adaptive equilibrium in its environmental surroundings (including social environments). Equilibrium is a preferred state of most cultural systems as they foster a security and long term stability of the system that permits people the margin for productive and reproductive success that they strive for in the world. Cultural equilibrium has several characteristics. Like other kinds of equilibrium systems, it provides its people a stable center and reference point, such that if the system is somehow perturbed, efforts will automatically be made to restore the balance of the system to a state of equilibrium. This can be framed in terms of cultural tradition and inherent conservatism of culture that is often downright coercive in its exaction of conformity to its constraints and sanctions, but I believe this is not the only or even necessarily the best way of understanding this complex kind of phenomenon. There appears to be an inherent resistance to change and a fundamental inertia to the new in human systems, and yet all systems depend upon the regular flux and input of new information and replacement of new resources and even people, to remain viable. It depends foremost on the ability to continuously rework old forms to fit new situations, and this is achieved as much functionally as it is symbolically--in fact the two forms are of the same coin and currency of human systems. Cultural institutions normally provide mechanisms by which this process is achieved, albeit these institutions and their methods vary substantially between different cultural configurations. Equilibrium depends, for one thing, upon cultural selection and selective transculturation--cultures must be capable of redefining their integrative patterns in a manner that permit them to adapt to new and changing circumstances in a successful manner.

I have adopted from the social theorist the term "structuration" and I have applied this term to the understanding of the kinds of on-going, day-to-day ways that cultural patterning is reiterated, reintegrated and reinforced such that the present is made to seem continuous with the sense of past, and I have therefore adopted the equivalent term "equilibriation" to refer to the continuous process of maintaining a kind of shifting and dynamic social and cultural (and even cognitive) equilibrium with an ever changing social environment.

In this model of equilibriation, it must be understood that the future prospects for any cultural group are never certain and are always subject to risks and unintended consequences that may affect the outcomes of any decision that is made that will affect the disposition of a cultural configuration or its modification.

It is understandable therefore than in normal circumstances, a premium should be placed upon maintaining the status quo of a system without significant modification, if every change brings with it the implication of risk and future insecurity. Equilibriation refers us to the efforts of people from day to day to maintain the sense of cultural adaptive balance, especially by means of "not rocking the boat." But it also entails the capacity for undertaking decisive action when action is called for. The challenge of equilibriation, like the related process of structuration, maintains the on-going integration of a cultural patterning that is so important to a cultural system. It is a process therefore that situates cultural change in the historical present of stage-actors who are caught up in the unfolding drama of their cultural play.

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The basis of human cultural development I argue to be a general form of selective acculturation that I refer to as transculturation. Transculturation involves the systemic development of hypernetworks as a result of horizontal cultural transmission and pattern diffusion. No single culture may be the source of stimulus diffusion, rather it is the system of interconnection that results in the spread of new traits and complexes. It entails therefore the development of a social and inter-cultural context within which patterns of reciprocity are established in some order.

Essentially, horizontal cultural transmission usually entails some measure of reciprocal relations, and hence most often of two way exchanges. Therefore, cultural patterning tends to be spread out and serves to regionally integrate various or different cultural groupings within a common system, or civilizational complex. Early fur trade in North America created these transculturative patterns among most North American Indian tribes during the Fur trade era. As long as trading contacts were a source of valued Western goods, especially guns and black powder, long distance trading networks naturally developed by which some tribal grouping served as intermediaries or as primaries in relation to other groups. Pariah middle-man groups arose, associated with the half-breed Metis, who became the key mediators of this transculturative system. Rendezvous complexes then became important annual and even seasonal events that attracted members from many different tribes for purposes of exchange on multiple levels. The kind of civilization that thus became articulated during this period of time in North America must be described as a native system that was fundamentally shaped by the values and material possession of items of the fur trade. Thus, native American cultures became critically influenced during this time by these transculturative processes based upon networks through which guns, whisky, furs, beads and brides regularly passed.

I imagine the spectacular development of the cave art during the Magdelanean in France and Northern Spain may have been the locus for another form of transculturative process. Those who possessed control over these cave complexes, may have had held a privileged monopoly over a form of magical power that would probably have been considered great in relation to other neighboring groups who did not have such caves. It would make sense to consider that these cave complexes may have also existed at the heart of a larger system of exchange, perhaps of basic material items like amber, ivory, or other fetish objects fashioned by people, and might have been based upon a kind of pre-herding adaptation and reliance upon the hunting of large herds across the primeval forests and fields of Western Europe.

Each new technological invention or innovation, the use of fire, the invention of the wheel, horse-riding, the sling, the bow and arrow, the boat, would have resulted in the formation of a new pattern of transculturation and the rise of new civilizational systems. There is no reason to believe that designs and devices like the wheel, fire or the boat were arrived at all at once. Rather, most of these innovations were achieved by trial and error and by experimentation and elimination of less efficient designs in favor of greater efficiency, that would have driving their development and widespread adoption. Adoption and transmission often entails some measure of modification in the process as well. People will borrow things from their distant neighbors, including new ideas, and adapt these to their own context and needs. The stone hammer used to beat to death a small game animal might be found to be effective in crushing open shell fish or nuts, or may be modified subsequently to become more efficient at this process. Thus, transmission itself often probably entailed a form of built-in innovation, hence the more frequently and widely something would get transmitted, the more likely that thing would evolve and be developed into a wider range of pattern variation. Widespread diffusion would probably also entail a modicum of built-in stimulus diffusion at the same time, as those things that become traded and exchanged at long distance can sometimes serve as the touchstone for new design innovations and rethinking old forms that might reverberate through cultural systems and affect cultural patterning upon multiple levels of its integrative expression. People are not just trading the thing, like the silk worm, but they are trading the entire technological process and cultural complex that is based upon the thing being traded, along with the know-how involved to reproduce this complex. Metallurgy is a case in point. Superior bronze implements would have been preferred over softer copper headed tools, and iron would have followed bronze. The knowledge of how to make bronze or iron probably did not transmit as quickly or as widely as the products of this industry did, but eventually the knowledge and ability to make iron implements would become widespread. Certain groups would strive to maintain a monopoly over these technologies, just as the wealthy west today strives to maintain a monopoly of technological know-how over the undeveloped world.

If we go backwards from bronze and copper to previous stone-age technologies, we must speculate on the relative merits and superiority of some forms of lithic technology over other alternative forms. Surely, new innovations in stone technology had the same kinds of transculturative effects in paleolithic, Mesolithic and early neolithic times as did metallurgy at a later time, although such advances might be considered minor and piecemeal by contemporary standards. Surely, prismatically striking blades off a central core, with the ability to rework the edges, proved a much more efficient means of manufacturing multiple "disposable blades" than depending upon flaking at oblique angles across the surface of a core and then reworking the edges.

It meant that cores could be carried long distance and used repeatedly before having to be replaced. It meant that superior kinds of stones that kept sharper edges and had greater cutting power could be selectively used over cruder kinds of stones that did not hold as sharp or as strong an edge. It meant that the hunter could forage over wider ranges and at longer distances and greater intervals, without having to worry about coming short of efficient weapons. Microblades must surely be associated with the rise of bow-and arrow complexes, as opposed to the reliance upon spears with heavier heads. Heavy headed spears were probably inefficient for the hunting of gracile deer or antelope, but may have been preferred for the hunting of heavier bear or bison. The point at which micro-blade technologies, or similar technologies suitable for the use of bows and arrows, emerged, probably indicated a general shift away from reliance on heavy, slow moving game, towards greater dependence on faster and less risky to hunt game. It meant, among other things, that individual or small groups of hunters could by themselves go out and safely procure sufficient game for their home party. The use of the bow and arrow and its preference over a spear was probably influenced by the rise of warfare patterns. A bow and arrow would have been a quite efficient means of dispatching an enemy, as people are not much larger than a deer, and shooting at a distance is always safer and less risky than having to close at short range.

It seems to me in thinking about the implications of transculturational process, that the archaeological context must have a means of incorporating a wider region of archaeological information together into a system, a civilizational or transculturative complex, than is available in a given area. It strikes me as a form of regional analysis that goes beyond the attempt to piece together the more local level or areal systems based upon home ranges and differential food-getting strategies. How frequently might hunting parties form in one area, to go on long range expeditions into the territories of known enemies, if not in search of game, then in search of war-trophies such as scalps or heads. It becomes possible, in other words, to use evidence derived from many different sites that are presumed to share a contemporaneous or similar period, to find evidence for long-distance transculturative patterns that would have been the bases of regional integration into a larger system.

In this regard, symbolic forms such as fetish symbols or other abstract representations should not be underestimated as indicative of some form of transculturative process occurring based upon a regional scale of integration. One thing about many of the Venus fetish figurines is that they are highly stylized in basic traits and overall form, and this stylization suggests the symbolic articulation of such civilizational complex. The occurrence and spread, for instance, of Astarte figurines during the early Iron age across the Aegean into the Middle East is an example of a similar kind of civilizational complex that is obviously associated with a religious system of belief and worship.

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Cultural selection is the process by which people choose over alternatives, the choices which result in the determination of pattern for a system. Cultural selection has evolutionary implications in that cultural selection processes often function in a manner that is understood for processes of natural selection, and often in both cases, the consequences are very analogous if not also homologous. Natural selection will result in some kind of speciational variation and development of a population. Cultural selection on the other hand leads invariably to some form of cultural differentiation of pattern at the level of the group. The central aspect of cultural selection is that it is fundamentally arbitrary, even though it may involve both conscious and unconscious or culturally constrained decision making and deliberation. Cultural selection must be seen therefore as a the influence of human rationality and logic upon the choices we may make and consequences that follow. We may follow a rational calculus, or just a rationalized calculus, or we may follow the cultural calculus that has been handed down to us and that is reinforced at every turn in our social life.

Transculturation then can be understood as the process by which some kind of design innovation becomes adopted and diffused, and eventually, universally accepted by human populations in spite of cultural boundaries and symbolic differentials that might otherwise interfere with such transmission processes. Things that become transculturated can be understood as those things that confer, almost without exception, some kind of adaptive value for a population, whether these be computers, microwaves, satellite dishes or, in a much earlier time, just crude stone tools. The mastery and control of fire is an example of transculturation. It may have been independently originated on numerous occasions, perhaps not to catch on or to become somehow extinguished before the concept of the use of fire could be transmitted very far abroad. It is evident though that the custom of building hearths and of making fire by one means or another, must have been easily recognized by our proto-hominids as an important source of warmth and security at night, and also as a means for cooking and assisting in the manufacture of tools, etc. People seeing the use of fire in action, and recognizing its positive value, were quick to seize the idea and adopt the innovation into their life-style. We might say that a transcultural phenomenon of a fire-complex arose to which, eventually, everyone subscribed. The innovation and widespread adoption of fire must have been a dramatic event for hominid evolution, as I believe it marked an important cultural step in which the hearth became a focal point of a groups cultural adaptation, and in which the processing and storage of meat could be contemplated and planned beyond the possibility of immediate consumption. At the same time, the actual acquisition and spread of the culture of fire use may have been rather gradual and slow to catch on. Some primitive groups may have even resisted the notion of domesticating fire for some time, though it would be hard now at this late state of our cultural development to think of a reason why this would be so.

Transculturation of devices takes two kinds I believe. The first is the transformation of the thing or complex being transmitted due to the adaptation of the complex to new or varying conditions. The second is the back-transmission of complexes for which one or more design innovations have been adopted. The first principle relies on the fact that cultural groups that already possess a certain complex the use, form and disposition of which may be culturally constrained, may be in fact unlikely to adopt significant innovations of the form or structure. It may instead be more likely to innovate the original thing into a variety of sub-types that might serve different purposes. Things and complexes that get transmitted across cultural boundaries, and hence across environmental settings, are more likely to be picked up and modified in their adaptation to a different set of needs.

The second type of transculturation, would involve the back-transmission of things that were modified or adopted on a wider scale, which means that there occurs a kind of feedback process by which trait complexes may become continuously modified and refined within a larger context, resulting in the elaboration and wide-scale adoption of a complex within a system.

The problem of transculturation refers us to the transformative effects of design innovations that leads to their selective adoption and accommodation within a cultural system, and across different cultural systems. Transculturation can be thought of as a special form of acculturation, the effects of which are usually seen as being positive and integrative, rather than destructive or disintegrative. With transculturation, the important thing being transmitted is not the object or the behavior itself, but the principle of the design of the object and its associated knowledge and functionality for a culture. Often, it is the idea alone that gets transmitted, once being observed and understood for its practical value, resulting in the stimulus diffusion of a trait-complex by means of its modeling and reconstruction.

Transculturation therefore refers us to the technical aspects of complexes and devices that have some functional value in human adaptation, but this may include ideas and symbolic devices as well that may have no other functional significance except that they may be a part of a ritual process or a wider belief system of which they are a part. I see the Venus figurines that appear in Europe with the rise of the great cave art, as possibly representing the first transmission of religious ideas that may have had to do with rites of fertility and fecundity, and may also have represented a belief in an anthropomorphic spirit or deity. Such a belief system would represent to me a rising level of social consciousness as well, an awareness of self and other in self-conscious relationship with one another, indicating awareness of differences between people.

On the other hand, such figurines may have been part of a magical rite or formula that conferred some properties to its handler or owner. If fertility was an essential concern, either the fertility of a person, or of an animal possibly, it reflected a conception of religion and belief in which spirits may have had an influence in the process of conception and birth. Either way, the transmission of these characteristic figurines represented a form of transculturation of an idea and an object that may have had no other functional significance than its symbolic or ritual or magical power, and was related to, indeed, partly representative of, a rather specific civilizational complex that took form and had great significance at this time in a rather broad context that spanned many different possible cultural adaptive patterns.

Transculturation is a process that is critically tied to cultural development and to the process of the integration of human systems into civilizational complexes. It is the means by which patterns of cultural innovation and invention in relation to human functional adaptation, becomes transmitted and diffused and universally incorporated by a large number of different cultural groupings. Inventions and innovations may not necessarily be achieved all at once, but may occur through a series of refinements and adjustments that lead to the realization of the full potential of a particular kind of device or technical system.

Fire may have been encountered many times before its possible functionality, or the fact that it may be kept in a controlled state, became realized. The realization that fire had possible uses may not have occurred all at the same time, but may have been worked out over time, either by accident or by deliberate cunning. I imagine the original proto-humans would have had a built-in fear of fire that had to be overcome in its domestication, and it is this kind of fear that would have had an influence of resistance to its adoption. That fire had power to destroy things must have been evident as well, and that fire would be associated with magic and spirits was also a part of a developing fire complex.

The adaptive significance and transculturative consequences of controlled use of fire should not be underestimated. Fire clearly provided human beings with a selective advantage over a range natural processes and forces they did not otherwise have, and their mastery of it entailed their growing capacity to learn and master other aspects and forces of their world as well.

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Transculturation is therefore more about the acquisition and transmission of critical knowledge than it is about the diffusion of things or traits across a cultural landscape. It is a form of knowledge which has a transformative effect not only upon the adaptive patterning of groups, but upon the social and noetic-symbolic aspects of group process. Transculturation is a basic civilizational process that confers to all people who are capable of possessing and using such knowledge more adaptively successful in changing and variable environments.

Human civilization, as both a process and a pattern of traits, tends to be integrative and progressive in its patterning of adaptational achievements and acquisition of new knowledge. This process has been occurring for a very long time, and we should not underestimate the extent of detail and expertise, and the body of experience, that becomes represented by various trait-complexes within cultural traditions and civilizations. Civilization provides a sense of tradition that may in fact transcend ethnoculturally defined boundaries, and that may encompass, as a "great tradition" many local traditions. This reflects the notion that in the rise of transculturative civilizational complexes, knowledge and symbolic reality may become essentially stratified between different levels of organization and integration. This sense of stratification of worldview has important implications I believe for the organization of experience and of behavior and the differential patterns of social relation and reciprocity that become established. It entails more complex forms of social organization than would be found with a single locus of a small group context, and it would involve therefore the inauguration of social rituals and mythologies that would serve to reinforce and legitimize asymmetrically structured relationships that would occur between different people.

The basis of a civilizational complex is a cultural tradition, or, alternatively, the interaction of a plurality of cultural traditions, in a manner that leads to constructive feedback and growth of knowledge and adaptive capacity for a system. Cultural loss and regression is not an uncommon occurrence, and when great civilizations collapse, as the Roman empire finally did in the Fifth Century AD, it can leave a structural and noetic vacuum that represents a tremendous loss of knowledge and experience. Much of the knowledge lost will be permanent. At the same time, I doubt that such a system, though broken down and disintegrated, or rather atomized by a larger power vacuum, would completely regress. Iron technology was still common, and much basic knowledge still retained that permitted people to adapt to their world. Though broken down, an internalized sense of symbolic and social stratification would still continue, though being without a central focus, and perhaps shifting its focus to a new concentric orientation.

It is evident in Europe that the influence of the Christian Church during the Dark Ages was critical to the emergence of a Medieval and modern European cultural identity that was transformed from the previous identities of people during the period of the Roman empire. Slavery, a common and widespread institution during the Roman period, took the form of a latifundian economy in which slaves were no better than cattle. The influence of Christian thought and doctrine that taught the spiritual value and equality of all people, including slaves, lead to a complete breakdown of the old institutional framework of latifundian style cartel slavery by the 10^th Century, during which brief period of time there was an unusual degree of freedom from forced constraint felt universally throughout Europe. This period of freedom was in fact transitional, and led rapidly to the reinstitution of an alternate form of involuntary servitude in the form of serfdom in which peasants were tethered permanently to their plots of land in obligation to a feudal lord or vassal.

Transculturation can be seen as a fundamental process of human civilization that is more than just about the dissemination of new ideas and knowledge systems or the diffusion of the trait complexes that are associated with these ideas. It is about the symbolic transformation of the collective consciousness of humanity, and the social organization of reality in a manner that achieves some larger sense of collective or superorganic order, if most often at the expense of individual freedoms and achievements. As a result of transculturation, human beings came to see themselves increasingly as actors in a social performance, members of a larger social entity, purveyors and protectors of a grander sense of tradition, than they previously realized for themselves. A genuine sense of social consciousness, in a Durkheimian sense of mechanical solidarity, would have emerged and had a critical impact on the human psyche.

What is achieved generally through positive processes of transculturation would be the structural and symbolic and functional integration of human cultural reality, for the achievement overall of greater adaptive productivity and reproductive success of the group or of some select members of a group, even if at the expense of others members of the group or members of some outgroup. Transculturation can be seen to have had a social evolutionary consequence upon human cultural, social and psychological patterning, as it would have resulted in the creation of new niche relations and conditions within the surrounding framework of a natural environment.

Positive transculturation must be seen therefore as a synthesizing and integrative process that involves environmental-ecological, symbolic and social-relational aspects at the same time. In other words, it is transformational for the entire cultural patterning of a group, and tends therefore to result in cultural development and drift through time. Its consequences will be evidenced at all levels of socio-cultural and cultural psychological integration.

This evolutionary consequence of transculturation can be expressed clearly in terms of a fundamental principle relating typically to human ontogenetic development:

1. The higher the level of transculturative integration achieved by a group within a larger civilizational complex, the more delayed and involved will be the post-partum processes of child development.

2. The higher the level of transculturative integration, the more secondary processes of enculturation and socialization will play a role in child development, and the more restrictive will be the secondary institutions sanctioning and constraining behavior and belief within a group context.

3. The higher the level of transculturative development that is achieved, the more these social control mechanisms will be internalized psychologically into the personality of the individual, and the more differentiated and embedded will be that individuals overall pattern of cultural response and behavior.

4. Relatively high levels of transculturative development, even under relatively primitive technological conditions, may result in the development of rather sophisticated and elaborated patterns of primary and secondary response and behavior.

5. We would expect to find, in archaeological systems where there is significant evidence of transculturative process and development occurring, as for instance with the cave-art civilization that arose in France and Spain during the Magdelanean, a relatively high degree of integrative cultural patterning in terms of the basic cultural model: i. e., 1. in terms of ecological-environmental adaptation (sophistication and specialization of technology, exemplified by the elaboration and variation of form and function; 2.in terms of the complex social organization and relational patterns achieved within and between groups; 3. in terms of the relative level of symbolic development and sophistication of knowledge achieved socially by a group, which might be reflected for instance, in the rise of ritual or craft specialists, specialized oratory or leadership, hunting skills, medical abilities, etc.

In other words, if in archaeological assemblages we may infer a relatively high degree of sophistication and development in terms of distinctive trait patterns that appear widespread, we may infer for the possessors of these patterns a relatively advanced or elaborated state of cultural patterning compared to a similar level or contemporaneous grouping lacking such civilizational refinements. Patterning of material evidence should somehow reflect this kind of achieved differential available to empirical comparative analysis.

These effects are the result of transculturative processes, and reflect the property of culture that it is contextually determined to a great extent, by the social and adaptive patterning of relations and group life. Children born into a group will rise to the level of that group and, on average no further. Their phenotypic plasticity will be shaped by the indirect constraints and conventions permitted by the cultural patterning of the social environment in which they are born and raised. Transculturation reflects a natural inclination both to achieve a maximum potential for development defined by the state of the art of a current technology, and to, in a disintegrative or negative form, to frustrate or limit such development. The evolution of cultural development in humans was fully isotropic and mirrored by the evolution of increasing periods of child development that was marked by degrees of social and symbolic dependency. A child reared with wolves will develop the cultural traits shared by wolves, and will rise little further than this. A child born of academic professors will adopt and rise to the level of their parents, on average.

Behind the model of transculturative process that accounts for cultural patterning and the formation of civilizational complexes and systems, is a presumption about the psychic unity of humankind. In other words, any group of people have the innate symbolic and intellectual capacity to rise to the maximum limits of their technological-environmental base, and within these constraints are capable of demonstrating an almost endless and very elaborative patterning of expressive variation and refinement. This presumption is basically true, universally true, for modern Homo sapiens. I do not think it can be applied with equal force the deeper in time we go, especially when we arrive a paleontological hominid specimens that exhibit marked differences in terms of cranial morphology. At the same time, even for contemporaneous or historically defined cultural patterns, this notion of the psychic unity of humankind must be conditionally and contextually defined by the relativistic considerations of the cultural patterning that is already in place. That transculturation is context-driven as a basic process is evident in the fact that almost no human beings, except perhaps for feral children displaced from their natural social environments, will be born and raised in a cultural vacuum. For most of humanity, some form of cultural and civilizational patterning was already in place, defined socially and environmentally within a larger context, and this has a profound shaping and constraining influence on the resulting development of the personality and patterning of the individual in the world. Effectively a priori cultural patterning will have a critical influence upon the resulting patterning of development of the child who is enculturated into that system.

Of course, in human prehistory, not all cultural patterning was full-blown, emergent upon the stage from the first curtain. The aim is to explain how this cultural patterning may have emerged in the first place, within which, as a kind of feedback process, human nature became increasingly socialized and dependent upon cultural context for its development. In this regard, all cultural development achieved by people can be seen as relatively to the group that it occurs within. These norms and standards would vary considerably between different groups and reflect fundamentally differential patterns of adaptation in different situations and niches. A culture of people who are raised by people would see nothing inherently wrong or bad with wolf-like behavior, and would adopt probably a form of cultural patterning and integration that would reflect or model wolf social behavior in many ways. Of course, for humans not evolutionarily designed to be wolves, this patterning would probably be detrimental in the long run and result in a low probability of survival for the members of the group. They could never, for instance, compete with real wolves, nor could they ever compete with human beings raised upon a more human model.

The interest of transculturative theory is therefore to explain the original rise of cultural developmental patterning and its variation of demonstration in differential cultural contexts. Archaeological systems might contribute to this kind of understanding in at least two ways. First it can seek in the archaeological record evidence for cultural development and transculturation in terms of changes and acquisition of trait complexes. Such transculturation seeks to understand how a system will change and become elaborated overtime in natural cycles of growth, maturity and eventual disintegration. Secondly, it can seek to define, for any given process or complex of historical development, the cultural context in which it occurs in terms of the tripartite analytical model of cultural patterning. It can find this in the consistency of elements and sharing that occurs both across space and through time, especially I believe in those trait complexes that are basic and "intrinsic" to any site formation that is considered a part or representative of a larger complex.

If almost no human beings have been bereft of some kind of transculturative context for the past three or four million years, it is equally true that all such transculturative contexts have been for the most part "underdetermined" in the sense that they are never completely successful in achieving integration or in the conditioning and subsequent control of individual behavioral response. Continuous environmental fluctuations will result in a shifting of the integrative parameters of a system, and will therefore result in a challenge for any cultural grouping to continuously seek to modify its cultural context in a manner that will achieve greater integration. There is a sense that if cultural context becomes too confining, too much the traditional straitjacket of the tribal model of conservative culture, then a society will fail to achieve the degree of modification and elaborative variation necessary for its basic trait-complexes, and will in the long run experience a crises in which its own cultural context is no longer functionally adaptive in a larger world. Mazeway reformulation, or symbolic crises and reintegration, resulting in what might be called a cultural frameshift, is often necessary to accomplish social reorganization. It is not uncommon to see groups, even highly civilized and technologically civilized societies, to seek symbolic kinds of solutions to what amount to ecological and adaptational kinds of problems, because, for whatever reason, they seem incapable of redefining an ecological mode of adaptation.

There is a sense as well that, for as long as human cultural organization has existed, there has occurred some form of overarching transculturative process that has tended in the long run to exert a transformative influence upon the cultural patterning of different groups that fall within is sphere. This influence can be thought of in the manner of Anthony Giddens as a kind of structurational process that tends to reshape human thinking, behavior and social relations from day to day and from one situation to the next. In the framework of Herskovit's Cultural Dynamics, it is the continuous elaboration of different individuals upon a cultural focus, which process leads to a gradual shift and intensification of the focal aspects of a cultural trait complex. Humans have therefore from the "beginning" experienced gradually increasing levels of both cultural constraint and conditioning and transculturative processes that are usually part of a larger social framework.

We make an analytical distinction therefore between the cultural context of group life within which an individual is born and raised, and probably in reference to which may live and die. At the same time, we make a distinction of the transculturative context which implies some form of intergroup patterning of relation. It is evident that in reality, in which achievement of effective, adaptive integration is at a premium, that the two patterns and their resulting contextual configurations will interact and to some extent overlap with one another. Rules and patterns of mate exchange and exogamy are indicative of a kind of transculturative process that has consequences both in terms of a transculturative context and a cultural-group context patterning. In a patrilineal, patrilocal society, it is evident that a young female will be born and raised within one family, only by her socially defined maturity be sold or traded off in marriage to another group context with which there might otherwise be no other affiliation. It is understandable in such contexts that there would be relatively low status-regard for young female daughter's in law, and that the role of the mother-in-law would become exaggerated in later life. To some extent, the cultural life of one group would become transplanted into the framework of the other group via the daughter as a mother, especially in reference to her own sons. Cases in which a black nanny might be responsible for nurturing and raising the children of white slave owners, is an interesting situation in which transculturative processes effectively cross cultural boundaries on one level or another. So would, by extension, other forms of trade and exchange have multi-level implications and reverberations for the overall patterning of integration of a system.

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Carrying capacity can be defined as a density dependent relationship to a populations environment. Carrying capacity is the basis for determining equilibrium of a group, or K, which can be defined as the point of natural population increase beyond which rates of death due to stress upon the environment comes into balance with rates of increase. It is clear, that different species that occupy different eco-trophic niches achieve different levels of K. Different species, of different modes of adaptation, body size and rates of population increase, will undergo different cycles of "bloom and doom" or "rise and demise" following a cyclical pattern of periodic-phase oscillation. These life-cycles of natural populations are to a great extent determined by the relative K achieved by the population. We might cite the following kind of general rule applicable to most living systems:

The lower the level of carrying capacity (K) achievable by a particular kind of living system, the more rapid and shorter-lived its periodic life-cycle as a population is likely to be, and this periodicity of life-cycle will tend to be strongly correlated with the periodicity of life-cycle of the individual member of the population.

Similarly, we can precisely say that human populations, especially when defined within a natural setting, as we can assume that our precursors would have been, followed exactly the same basic patterns of natural life cycles and achievement of carrying capacity. We can say that cultural mediation and selection patterns have fundamentally affected these processes, and has resulted in the achievement of new forms of equilibrium and complex carrying capacity that would not be permitted under completely natural conditions of human adaptation. We can state the following rule:

The carrying capacity of any human population is directly correlated and proportional to its level of achieved cultural development.

The higher the carrying capacity of a cultural system, the greater and more stable the population densities of this system can be assumed to be.

All cultural systems have a normal life cycle, and will eventually cease to exist. Its people will perish, migrate or become culturally transformed into a new cultural system.

While these rules may obviously apply to sedentary systems based upon agriculture and domestication of plants and animals, it may be somewhat less obvious how this general rule may apply with equal force to previous more primitive systems that lacked domestication of food-resources and that depended upon the natural availability and abundance found in nature. I would claim that the same principles held true at even a fairly early epoch of human prehistory, and that these were based upon the achievement of adaptive food-getting and processing technologies that permitted human beings to more efficiently and effectively exploit their natural environments. Such systems could not have achieved the level of carrying capacity possible under more advanced systems of agricultural intensification, etc., but it is still worthwhile to consider the possibilities that prime resource rich regions, with the proper suite of cultural technologies available, remarkable levels of population increase might have been achieved. Such systems would probably experience rather short trajectories and life-cycles just the same, perhaps rising and falling within just a few generations, unless other factors, such as relative cultural isolation or the achievement of cultural mechanisms of internal regulation were achieved that sustained relatively high optimum densities for an indefinite period of time.

Human carrying-capacity in any environmental setting would be fundamentally culturally determined by the kinds of food-getting and social regulating technologies and systems that could be put into place and maintained over the long term. The capacity of a cultural group to achieve adaptation to the level that maximizes its given carrying capacity, based upon the available technology and social patterning and organization, is a mark of the success of that group. We should not expect groups possessing only a stone-age tool technology and basic horticultural practices to be capable of achieving the levels of equilibrium and social integration that would be achievable, for instance, with iron technology and agricultural knowledge. If we look to pre-contact New Guinea highland societies, we see stone age cultures with a pig-horticultural complex achieving remarkable degrees of equilibrium and relatively high levels of carrying capacity. We also find chronic patterns of warfare, reports of cannibalism, and a typical headhunting complex that was characteristic through the Southeast Asian region.

Human cultures in general can be said to strive for long-term equilibrium, but this general rule is not without noteworthy exceptions. It is not uncommon for the equilibrating mechanisms available to a cultural group, namely its symbolic system and its social order, to begin to function in a counteradaptive manner that leads to a pattern of self-destructive behavior by the group as a whole. This pattern is in fact not uncommon in known human history.

Cultural equilibrium should not be confused with the conservativism of an unchanging or resistant cultural tradition. I believe that traditions may in fact have been continuously reworked and reshaped over time to suit new sets of needs under new environmental circumstances. Cultural equilibrium reflects rather the health of a cultural grouping to adapt to and succeed in a variety of changing environmental circumstances. It entails their capacity to achieve some sense of compromise and balance between their cultural values and the external realities that force changes from preferred styles and modes of behavior or belief.

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I have made a claim that cultural patterning has always existed in some kind of larger cultural context that is defined by its relationships with both the natural and social environment. Whatever the internal dynamics of a cultural group in time and place, that group will be subject to the influence and behavior of other cultural groupings, either directly in contact, or indirectly through some intermediate sets of variables like shifting environmental patterns, resource availability, etc. We cannot construe any cultural grouping as existing in complete isolation in time and place from other cultural groupings that surrounded it. Isolation of any cultural grouping would, in the long run, have meant evolutionary extinction for that grouping. We can make a case that even cultural groupings that occurred on remote Islands of the Pacific, for instance, did not experience total isolation, but were in general networked into trade and political webs that extended across different island chains and that consisted of regular expeditions sent between the different islands.

From a systems point of view, this would entail that whatever a cultural grouping may or may not achieve in its home range context, it would be periodically and chronically subject to external pressures and changes that would occur in the larger system that would have some kind of affect on the patterning of the group and that would be essentially beyond the capacity of the group to control except in terms of maintaining effective cultural boundaries or distancing mechanisms that prevent or inhibit with a high threshold some forms of acculturative contact. We can call this larger context the framework of acculturation that prevails in a certain region during a certain period of time.

In a supracultural or "transcultural" perspective, it is not so much the individual cultural patterning of any particular grouping in time or space that is so important, so much as it is the overall patterning of interrelationships and exchange dynamics occurring throughout regionally structured systems that may be, in the structure of the long run, more important to consider. In other words, larger structural patterns underlying intercultural relationships may predominant in a region that encompasses a range of different cultural patterns that are to some degree constrained and shaped by these overarching influences. A case can be made that situationally, one cultural grouping may be replaced by another, and the outcome within the larger acculturative framework would still be more or less the same.

I have adapted a model of dynamic cultural succession from similar models of community succession developed in ecological theory, as I believe this way of seeing cultural patterning and change in its larger social historical context is important to a systems approach. This model can be found to articulate on several interrelated levels:

1. An overall order of patterning of cultural developmental sequence from primary and basic cultural patterning to secondary, elaborated and derivative institutional patterning.

2. An expected sequence of cultural succession for any particular group within a regional framework that in general runs from primary to intermediate to advanced forms of socio-cultural adaptation and organization, depending upon highest achieved technological knowledge base characteristic of that phase or place and period.

3. An expected sequence of cultural succession that is regionally defined by ecozones such that upon peripheral margins of core-resource rich areas, there is a succession toward the ecological center at which the more advanced forms of cultural developmental patterning are expected to occur.

4. An overall regional stability of transcultural systems such that, whatever the successional dynamics occurring for any one particular cultural grouping or phase, the overall system in which this is occurring is more or less stable.

5. Regional and interregional succession will occur for larger transcultural systems and civilizational complexes, such that the structural order established for one regional phase will eventually become replaced by the structural order achieved by successive regional phases.

6. Natural life-cycles of social patterning of groups and systems at all levels can be expected to occur, such that each group will have its beginning, development, stable or mature phase, and its subsequent period of decline. Just as we can claim that cultural patterning is stratified on several levels of integration, so too can we see that the cycles that characterize this pattern is occurring at multiple levels as well. There are smaller cycles embedded within larger cycles, which contextualize and constrain the succession of the smaller embedded cycles.

It is apparent that the age-area model in the interpretation of patterns of diffusion and dialectical differentiation of language is applicable to an understanding of the patterning of regional and interregional succession phases and regimes.

The definition of culture that this model depends upon understands cultural patterning to be naturally stratified upon several different levels of articulation and integration at the same time. Thus we may identify the individual, the primary group, the secondary group, the tertiary and even quaternary groups, and we can identify as well the larger transcultural context as exemplifying dynamic cultural processes and patterns. We find therefore cultural patterning to be complexly stratified upon multiple levels simultaneously. Though the levels are interdependent to some extent, these interdependencies are not completely determining at the different levels of cultural articulation. The resulting structure is complex but not rigid. Individual patterning may be constrained and shaped by the group cultural patterning of the family or the larger groups within which the family is situated. There may be inherent subcultural and cross-cultural influences that cross-cut the influence of the primary or secondary group, and serve to remove the individual from the framework of the group. All groups are also defined at least implicitly within a larger cross-cultural or transculturational framework that exhibits its own heterogeneous cultural patterning that may have a shaping or constraining influence upon any patterns within it.

Cultural succession can be seen therefore to operate simultaneously upon all levels of cultural patterning and to lead to different kinds of consequences at these different levels. At the same time, the model of cultural selection can be fit into a larger framework of the more general model of eco-cultural evolution, such that we may see in the long term patterns of cultural succession the gradual rise and fall of great civilizations, and the sowing of seeds in the wake of such civilizations for the rise of entirely new waves of cultural entities.

We may adapt a model for cultural systems as follows:

1. Cultural systems tend towards growth and increasing symbolic-institutional elaboration in both extensive and intensive ways. We can say that cultural systems gradually develop from basic, primitive systems toward more differentiated and complexly integrated systems.

2. All cultural systems exist within a delimited ecological-environmental framework of time and place, which framework sets basic limits and constraints to the growth and development of such systems.

3. Patterns towards increasing growth and differentiation result in cyclical patterns of periodic alternation and replacement once the basic limits of the system have been overreached by its development.

From this model of cultural succession, we may hypothesize that, under stable conditions of optimal adaptational equilibrium, communities will achieve what can be referred to as an eco-cultural climax that represents the highest level of differentiation, heterogeneity and complexity possible within the constraints operating over that system. Larger regional transcultural systems may exist in the long run with a level of stability that makes its systems and subsystems relatively long-lived at the level of eco-cultural climax.

The framework of cultural succession must be understood within a larger framework in which eco-cultural adaptations of cultural systems can be said to constitute a complex set of ecosystemic relationships and community dynamics upon several levels of articulation within a larger framework. All such systems can be said to be by definition partially open systems. Such systems can be said to comprise their own metabiotic communities that set the tune for the eco-trophic pyramid operating within the contexts of that system.

All such systems at the same time can be said to have existed within a larger field of macroscopic, or regional/interregional relationships that can be described as transculturational in pattern. Different groups interacted with one another in different ways, with a range of possible outcomes. To a great extent, we can posit therefore the operation of coevolutionary eco-cultural systems within a larger metabiotic context in which the developments occurring within one system would influence and lead to equilibrating responses occurring in other systems. Furthermore, if networks are highly developed and widespread, it is possible that the dynamics occurring in one system may affect indirectly the dynamics of many other systems that are not directly in contact to this system, if it results in reverberations of the regional transcultural system that leads to a chain reaction or domino effect influencing many different cultures.

We can expect there to arise therefore co-evolutionary cultural systems in which the parameters of one's groups cultural development and its resulting state-path trajectory is the direct or indirect consequence and response to the alternative pattern of development experienced by another or related cultural system.

Co-evolutionary systems can be defined as two or more cultural communities that are overlapping in their adaptive patterns or else are contiguous with one another, but are evolving upon separate but interrelated pathways. They therefore tend to coevolve interdependently, such that changes affecting one will lead to alterations in the other pattern. Coevolutionary development is a selectional concept of eco-cultural systems describing the mutual succession of two interdependent cultural systems. Individuals or subgroups may pass between such systems, and occupy strategic places in relation to both, but the directional pathways of each system is basically different and separate from that of the other.

Coevolutionary structures lead to what can be referred to as counteradaptational strategies in which the developmental patterns of one group or cultural system may become directly linked to the cultural patterning of another cultural system, or in a more indirect manner involving several cultural systems as intermediates. There can occur as a consequence of this patterning the rise of what might be referred to as cultural schismogenesis, or what Gregory Bateson described as the elaboration of a cultural focus or complex by one group vis-à-vis a similar elaborative patterning of a different but competing group. This process has been documented ethnographically, and it has also been documented historically in reference to both contemporary and ancient societies. We can see this in the "arms race" of the Cold War Era, as well as in the "space race" which competitive challenge spurred both the US and the Soviet Union to accelerate their programs of space exploration far faster than they might otherwise have accomplished.

The general concept of schismogenesis provides us with a competitive framework within which to understand the coevolutionary development and elaboration of certain cultural complexes within a larger regional or interregional context, and provides therefore an alternative basis for understanding one of the possible processes underlying transculturational patterning of civilizational complexes in the past.

If we looked deeper into the past, we might speculate upon a less intense form of cultural schismogenesis, perhaps occurring upon a symbolic and possibly a technological level, that might have led to the formation and maintenance of boundaries between groups, internal social reorganization, and accelerating the cultural intensification of systems vis-à-vis one another within a regional/interregional framework. Much of the appropriation of symbolisms and material artifacts through diffusion and acculturation, what marks a certain event horizon in the archaeological record, may have been attempts of cultural systems in competition with one another not to be one-upped, and to stay ahead of the game that was being played.