"This paper presents an exploratory attempt to solve the problem of how to infer traits for which no direct material evidence remains." The author suggests that the archeologically defined community pattern can predict several sociocultural traits. Results support this hypothesis.

This study uses empirical analysis to parse out different dimensions of permissiveness in child-rearing. Oral-sexuality, independence-anality, and aggression are the dimensions identified.

This article uses factor analysis to identify the key variables underlying the many cross-cultural associations reported by Textor (1967). Twelve factors are identified.

This article examines shamans and other types of magico-religious healers. Agriculture and political integration are suggested to influence the transformation of shamans into shaman/healers, healers, or possession-trance mediums.

The authors examine the relationship between magico-religious practitioner type and socioeconomic variables in order to present a typology of magico-religious practitioners. Three bases for magico-religious practitioners are discussed in terms of selection procedures and activities. Several hypotheses are empirically tested, and descriptive generalizations derived from analyses are presented.

Expanding on the author’s previous findings, this article examines the social and economic variables that may explain the cultural evolution of religious practitioners. With a 47 society sample, the author found that subsistence activities and socio-political conditions predict magico-religious practitioner types (sorcerers/witches, priests, shamanistic healers, mediums, healers, shaman/healers, and shamans) with the strongest results being from subsistence and political organization. He then used these findings to theorize about the biogenetic bases of religion in societies.

This article offers a detailed analysis of neuropsychopsiological processes involved in altered states of consciousness (ASC) in order to design and evaluate a psychophysiological model of trance states. Cross-cultural hypotheses concerning ASC are tested.

Dozens of reasons have been proposed for the emergence of professional religious specialists in human history with little general consensus. Creating a global dataset of hunter-gatherers and using a novel method of exploratory phylogenetic path analysis, this study systematically identifies factors associated with the emergence of religious specialists. Results regarding existential insecurity were generally not supported. This study emphasizes the role of food storage as one of the only significant factors despite that it has been largely overlooked in the literature and theories. The results also highlight the need for more in-depth directional dependencies to better illustrate this evolution.

The author utilizes Beardsley et al.'s (1956) settlement pattern typology to develop a five-rank scale of cultural complexity. The scale was developed using 30 traits converted into categorical form. The scale is designed for use by archaeologists to infer or presume the existence of certain nonmaterial cultural traits in a given society.

This paper seeks to understand the extent to which religion has been used to legitimize political power in the past, and the extent to which that carries into contemporary institutions. The authors seek to demonstrate that there is a strong link between the stratification of societies in the past and the presence of autocracies in many of those same areas today. They make their case by putting forward, and testing, three linked theories -- first, that stratified societies are more likely to develop religions based on moralizing high gods as a means of divine legitimization, second, that the societies that used religion for legitimacy in their past are more likely to have religion embedded in their institutions today, and third, that societies that used religion for legitimacy in the past are more likely to be autocracies today.