Archaeological theory in general demands the development of coherent conceptual models for understanding the basic cultural and historical dynamics of the human past. What is sought is a kind of model that will serve to unify the themes and disparate frames of reference that are available to archaeology in a synthetic manner, while at the same time fitting analysis and interpretation within a larger explanatory framework that will make self-evident and logically driven its methods and results. In short, what is sought is a comprehensive or unifying general model of archaeological systems, or what might be better defined as archaeological systems representing the human past in a general sense. Such a theory would of necessity be hypothetico-deductive similar to Darwin's theory of evolution. It would represent a system of conceptualization about the human past that would fit a systematic understanding of cultural and social patterning, as revealing consistent structural relations, within an historical and evolutionary framework describing the rise of humankind and their cultural development leading to forms of human civilization.

In this second part, I have proposed a basic set of heuristic models that I consider to be important to an understanding of the human past. I do not claim that these are the only or most important models that we need for a complete explanation of our past, but I do not think that they can be safely ignored in our conceptualizations if we seek comprehensive understanding. The models I put forward concern focally: 1. Cultural anthropogenesis; 2. Eco-cultural integration; 3. Cultural mediation & transformation. 4. Cultural selection & evolution; 5. Transculturation & cultural development; 6. Civilizational complexes & regional systems; 7. Cultural equilibriation.

The central argument of this entire text is that cultural patterns have been vitally important to humankind from the beginning of their development. They arose within an evolutionary context and therefore in that original context the rudimentary proto-cultural pattern had fundamental adaptive efficacy. Original proto-culture, very much like that observed among Chimpanzee populations in the wild, probably originated at about the same period of time in the same regional framework but may have involved multiple groups and multiple independent experiments. Culture in its original, prototypical form may not have been shared or transmitted very broadly between different hominid groups, but it may have achieved in its original context some degree of minimal horizontal transmission. It certainly achieved, I believe, a strong sense of vertical "gene-culture" transmission in these early contexts, and thus also some measure of diagonal transmission as well.

Since this entire argument depends upon culture, it is important at the outset to offer a sufficient definition of culture. It is clear that archaeologists in general deal with different models of culture than do cultural anthropologists or even historians. It is equally clear that cultural models within anthropology have general relevance and applicability in all areas of learning about human reality. The definition of culture that I have adopted within this text is rooted to a naturalistic conceptioning of human systems theory and the significance of the concept of culture to such theory. I would define human culture in an general anthropological manner as:

Culture arose originally as an emergent property of a trait-complex that served the evolutionary function of human adaptation and reproductive success. Its early evolutionary success led to cultural development conditioning subsequent human evolution in a feedback process that I define as cultural anthropogenesis. This had a focus upon extended post-partum infant dependency and cognitive development that included environmental conditioning and extreme phenotypic plasticity of anthropomorphic trait patterns. The consequence has been the transmission and elaboration of cultural patterning to a high degree of variability that has resulted in increasing levels of human social, cultural and symbolic dependency for development upon environmental conditioning. Cultural selection, mediation and transmission processes soon became fundamentally independent of natural, evolutionary based constraints, though they still had to operate within and adapt to a larger ecological and natural environmental framework. This has led to the development of what can be called secondary socio-cultural institutions that in general function to promote and propagate cultural patterns and solve the problems of cultural production and reproduction. When we come to the problem of secondary institutional patterning of cultures, we reach a stage of cultural development and elaboration that is more traditionally dealt with by cross-cultural studies that deal with the aspects of culture like religion, politics, social organization, etc.

The central archaeological problem to be dealt with in this book is the problem of what can be called primary, versus secondary, cultural institutionalization. Primary culture deals with the basic foundations of cultural patterning in promoting human survival and shaping human behavior. It is assumed that secondary socio-cultural institutionalization is derived from and built upon primary patterning, and to a great extent, can be accounted for and explained in terms of this secondary patterning.

Anthropologists, archaeologists and others may balk that my definition of culture as a kind of typical human patterning of thought and behavior lacks the hallmarks of conventional definitions of culture. My only argument is that this definition of culture was experimentally derived on the basis of inference from empirical data sets. It is a scientific definition of culture as recognizable phenomena that may be studied and analyzed, even to some extent, predicated and predicted, on the basis recurrent and statistically significant differentials and similarities of patterning.

The basis of this sociocultural model can be found to exist in the tripartite functionalist scheme of archaeological systems: 1. The material base or substructure; 2. The social structure; 3. The ideological (i.e. symbolic) superstructure. At the same time, this model is continuously being articulated between the individual member of a cultural grouping, and the grouping as a whole. The grouping may in turn be defined at multiple levels of integration, often occurring at the same time, hierarchically stratified within a single system. Even the most primitive proto-cultural models, therefore, contained the rudimentary elements of this kind of structural system: it was the development of these components under varying environmental conditions that led to the evolutionary development of human civilization as a transcultural process.

Such a model will be arrived at by understanding that the culture historical baseline for human civilization was some hypothesized and idealized "mother culture" that was relatively undeveloped (or "primitive") and that was in a generalized manner the foundation for all subsequent cultural developments and differentiation. In point of fact, there probably never was such a general proto-culture. What in fact existed was probably more of a gradual process of emergence derived from the kinds of precultural patterning that have been observed among feral Chimpanzee populations. This patterning was probably polytypical from the beginning, depending largely upon the environmental contexts in which any particular group would have depended.

Primary cultural patterning has been assumed by many to consist or be best exemplified by what is known as "hunter gatherer" adaptations in the world, that are relatively simplified, primitive, diffuse and undifferentiated, and without the secondary institutional elaboration of cultures characteristic of sedentary agricultural or horticultural based societies. I will claim that this is only partly true, but that we must be careful with the use of ethnographic analogies from a late historic period especially to proto-cultural adaptations in a very remote and deep era of the human past.

In considering the models presented in this third part, I've come to question the wisdom of received anthropological categories, such as "hunter and gatherer" or "forager and collector" as necessarily an adequate level for the description of the complexities and continuities of the past adaptations of humankind to the natural environment. Such labels smuggle hidden presuppositions of social patterning, behavior and structure that may or may not have necessarily existed. The Binfordian model of ecologic-social adaptation based upon a restrictive definition of "hunters and gatherers" I therefore find to be faulty. Instead, I have invoked the following model:

1. Humans have individually and socially come to occupy a variety of niches through a variety of culturally mediated practices. It makes little sense to speak of "Hunting and Gathering" or of "Foraging and Collecting" as exclusive, either or, or even as conjunctive models implying all other kinds of things. Hunting is a form of predation that may take many different forms and aim at many different trophic sub-levels and niches. Better therefore to speak of forms of predation. Similarly, gathering is a term that may mean either foraging and faunal predation, or it may mean collecting and hoarding or stockpiling.

2. Humans have also come to occupy a range of trophic levels in the same manner. They are defined by their broad-based omnivory and their opportunistic generalization. They probably came early on to achieve significant marine as well as terrestrial adaptations, with intermediate biomes being some of the richest and most diverse resource regions or locations available to such an omnivorous species.

3. Humans have therefore tended to saturate their regional distributions to the maximum numbers by natural population increase, culturally mediated, that was possible to support by the efficiency of their eco-trophic adaptations.

4. There occurred over time cultural selection for more efficient-energetic eco-trophic systems of adaptation. If an advanced Homo sapiens won out over their Neanderthaloid cousins, it was probably because they possessed more efficient systems of eco-trophic adaptation. More efficient systems of eco-trophic adaptation in general permit:

1. Higher population densities.

2. Greater long term stability of human populational systems.

3. Less resource insecurity for such populational systems.

We may say, regardless of the anthropological rhetoric, that stylized "Hunter Gatherer" type systems were inherently less efficient and more entropic than more sedentary or alternative systems that may have existed, and therefore only permitted a small number of people to survive in a region per total biomass availability in that region. More sedentary systems arose in time that were probably mixed, hybrid systems that may have depended for instance, upon fishing adaptations and seasonal collecting enterprises that tended to net a surplus of resources. Hoarding and cacheing of food reserves seems like an obvious and logical solution to the problem of the inherent irregularity of food supply over the long run. Such hoarding strategies in turn would entail the development of appropriate processing and preserving technologies. This is an adaptation found in squirrels and birds, and it is one that could be expected in humans as well.

In this regard, it is not the apparent continuity of primary cultural adaptations that needs explaining, so much as it was the possible range of variation that such primary cultural patterns may have achieved within the limits set down by nature and relatively basic technologies. It is not the narrow range of similarities that need to be accounted for in our paleontological and archaeological records, but the possibly wide ranges of variation and levels of systems development that may have been achieved, or could have been achievable, in primitive natural and cultural contexts.

I would suggest that a systems approach demands that the small "band" or kin-group that was allegedly for so long the basis of human evolution was always of necessity integrated into a larger system of ecological and socially defined relationships that encompassed the primary group and conditioned their opportunities and chances for success in a natural world. When human migrations occurred, the could not have done so by means of small kin-groups fleeing dangers behind them, establishing themselves on a remote frontier. Such groups, if too small, would have essentially died out. Human populations of course periodically bottlenecked, but never to such an extent that it was reduced to the essence of a single kin-group. We must make a case therefore for a early kind of, perhaps pretribal, "ethno-national identity" that encompassed most hominids at a fairly early time as a distinct "the people." This would have entailed all the attendant ethnocentrisms that enculturated human beings are heir to. It would also have probably entailed very early a primitive form of warfare and exchange between different peoples who recognized their separate identities in a significant and symbolic manner. It can be said therefore that a significant part of proto-cultural development was self-conscious recognition by early hominids of their social identity vis-à-vis other people in the world.

Human beings, by their relatively big brains, have been challenged at every step of their past to overcome the challenges of survival that their environments have always presented to them. It has entailed that they be capable of improving their circumstances by inventing and discovering for themselves new ways of finding and making food, new ways of protecting themselves from natural forces, the elements, predators, diseases and even one another. It entailed that humans created for themselves their own cultural systems that permit their adaptation and survival within bounds of their environments and at the same time extend these boundaries to encompass wider ranges of resources.

It is evident to me that to adopt basic monothetic labels like "hunter-gatherer" to explain most of the human past is to obfuscate the possible polythetic variation that probably characterized prehistoric adaptive patterning in a complex and variegated environment. People of the past, like those of the present, we all not doing just one kind of thing. Humans as generalists were learning to exploit a wide range of resources in their environments, and when knowledge was gained that had adaptive or functional efficacy, this knowledge would tend to be preserved and transmitted or diffused. If we seek a monothetic model as a baseline for human prehistoric development, then we are likely to ignore the possible range of variation that may really have occurred in the past. We might be surprised to find periods and places for instance of unusually cultural development and relatively high levels of population density in a very remote past. Human migration and acculturation models also suffer from a chronic case of historic oversimplification. People of the past were probably moving around much more and often much further than we would want to give them credit for by their fixed locations in archaeological or paleontological sites. A thousand years, ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years or a million years, all permitted enough time for witnessing numerous human migration events. We can say that, in spite of frequent migration and even occasional replacement of one population by another, there occurred overall a longer term and wider scale continuity of cultural patterning and development in a basic sense at least.