| Illustrations | p. vii |
| Preface | p. ix |
| The Early History of Evolutionism | p. 1 |
| Herbert Spencer and the Concept of Evolution | p. 3 |
| The Evolutionary Views of Tylor and Morgan | p. 5 |
| The Reconstruction of Cultural Evolution | p. 9 |
| The Comparative Method | p. 10 |
| The Possibility of a Social Science | p. 11 |
| The Uniformity of Nature | p. 13 |
| The Principle of Continuity | p. 14 |
| From Simplicity to Complexity | p. 14 |
| The Objective Rating of Cultures | p. 15 |
| Evolution Not an Inherent Tendency | p. 16 |
| The Psychic Unity of Man | p. 17 |
| Differential Evolution | p. 18 |
| Contemporary Primitives and Ancestral Cultures | p. 19 |
| Modern Primitives Not Primeval | p. 22 |
| Primal Human Society | p. 23 |
| Survivals | p. 24 |
| The Characteristics of Cultural Evolution | p. 27 |
| Rectilinearity | p. 27 |
| Unilinearity | p. 28 |
| The Skipping of Stages | p. 31 |
| The Law of Evolutionary Potential | p. 32 |
| Rates of Evolution | p. 32 |
| Diffusion and Evolution | p. 33 |
| The Determinants of Cultural Evolution | p. 39 |
| Inherent versus External Determinants | p. 40 |
| Psychic Unity as an Active Agent | p. 42 |
| Racial Determinism | p. 44 |
| Human Perfectibility | p. 48 |
| Individuals as Determinants | p. 49 |
| The Influence of Great Men | p. 50 |
| Ideas as Prime Movers | p. 53 |
| Historical Materialism | p. 58 |
| Environmental Factors | p. 61 |
| Subsistence as a Determinant | p. 62 |
| Economic Determinants | p. 64 |
| Social Determinants | p. 65 |
| War as a Determinant | p. 66 |
| Natural Selection | p. 68 |
| Conclusion | p. 73 |
| Anti-Evolutionism in the Ascendancy | p. 75 |
| The Boasian Backlash | p. 75 |
| Diffusionism in British Anthropology | p. 78 |
| The Functionalist Reaction | p. 80 |
| Malinowski | p. 81 |
| Radcliffe-Brown | p. 82 |
| Anti-Evolutionism in Later British Social Anthropology | p. 85 |
| Remaining Islands of Cultural Evolutionism: James G. Frazer | p. 87 |
| Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg | p. 89 |
| Sumner and Keller | p. 91 |
| George P. Murdock | p. 94 |
| The Barren Landscape | p. 96 |
| Theorizing Disavowed | p. 97 |
| Historical Particularism | p. 98 |
| Early Stages in the Reemergence of Evolutionism | p. 99 |
| Leslie A. White | p. 99 |
| Diffusion versus Evolution | p. 102 |
| The Derivation of Evolutionary Formulas | p. 104 |
| Cultural Relativism and the Rating of Cultures | p. 107 |
| In Spite of Themselves | p. 108 |
| Julian H. Steward | p. 110 |
| V. Gordon Childe | p. 115 |
| Evolutionism in Ethnology in the 1950s | p. 118 |
| The Darwin Centennial | p. 122 |
| Issues in Late Midcentury Evolutionism | p. 127 |
| New Steps Forward | p. 127 |
| General and Specific Evolution | p. 127 |
| History versus Evolution | p. 130 |
| Archaeology and Evolution | p. 132 |
| Service's Sequence of Stages | p. 137 |
| Processual Archaeology | p. 141 |
| Lewis Binford and Middle Range Theory | p. 142 |
| Ethnographic Analogy and Parallels | p. 144 |
| Ethnoarchaeology | p. 145 |
| General Systems Theory | p. 146 |
| Respectability Regained | p. 148 |
| "Neo-Evolutionism" | p. 149 |
| Features of the Evolutionary Process | p. 151 |
| Developmental Stages | p. 151 |
| Process versus Stages | p. 155 |
| Scale Analysis and the Refinement of Sequences | p. 157 |
| Verifying Inferred Sequences of Development | p. 159 |
| Directionality in Evolution | p. 159 |
| Complexity as the Hallmark of Evolution | p. 161 |
| Is Evolution Irreversible? | p. 163 |
| The Objective Rating of Cultures | p. 165 |
| Rates of Cultural Evolution | p. 169 |
| The Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution | p. 171 |
| The Darwinian Model | p. 173 |
| Adaptation Considered Further | p. 179 |
| Typological versus Populational Concepts | p. 181 |
| What Drives the Evolution of Culture? | p. 185 |
| Elman Service versus Marvin Harris | p. 185 |
| Cultural Causality Examined | p. 187 |
| Determinants: White and Steward Considered Separately | p. 191 |
| Steward and White Compared | p. 194 |
| Ecological Approaches: Limitations and Pitfalls | p. 196 |
| Functionalism and Evolutionism Join Forces | p. 198 |
| Population Pressure as a Determinant of Evolution | p. 200 |
| Warfare as a Determinant | p. 208 |
| Trade as a Determinant | p. 211 |
| Other Perspectives on Cultural Evolution | p. 213 |
| Ideology and Evolution | p. 213 |
| Marxist Anthropology and Cultural Evolution | p. 218 |
| Microevolution and Agency Theory | p. 223 |
| Elements of Evolutionary Formulations | p. 229 |
| Evolution: Unilinear or Multilinear? | p. 229 |
| Laws of Cultural Development | p. 238 |
| British Social Anthropology and Cultural Laws | p. 242 |
| American Anthropologists and Cultural Laws | p. 243 |
| The Comparative Method and Its Application | p. 250 |
| The Problem of Sampling | p. 254 |
| Current Issues and Attitudes in the Study of Cultural Evolution | p. 263 |
| New and Lingering Opposition to Cultural Evolutionism | p. 263 |
| The Attitude of British Social Anthropologists | p. 266 |
| American Archaeologists Resist "Neo-Evolutionism" | p. 273 |
| Archaeologists Accept and Apply Evolutionism | p. 276 |
| The Quantification of Cultural Evolution | p. 285 |
| Cultural Evolutionism and the Sociologists | p. 286 |
| Summary | p. 287 |
| References Cited | p. 289 |
| Index | p. 313 |
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