A literature review of burial customs and their related assumptions and data orientations is presented. A cross-cultural study suggests there are associations between measures of mortuary ritual variety and societal structural complexity.

This book investigates individual and group responses to death and the problems that death can create in a society. Several hypotheses regarding grief and mourning, as well as their variation with other societal variables, are supported with cross-cultural tests.

Carneiro presents work on the evolutionary sequences of cultures. He concludes that human societies have evolved in a direction towards increased complexity. He also discovers a specific sequence of cultural traits that societies have largely followed.

Authors suggest that in a majority of studied societies, kin of the deceased tend to engage ritually in risky prolonged and intimate preparation behaviors with corpses. This occurs namely in visual exposure and tactile interaction. Authors hypothesize that this extended contact not only allows true confirmation of death (through exposure to many cues), but also facilitates acceleration of a grieving process that returns the bereaved to a normal state of social functioning.

"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 paper investigates two mechanisms of cultural evolution: peaceful diffusion and warlike migration. Two societies, one for each mechanism, were compared to a base society on 11 culture traits. Eight of the 11 traits diffused more readily through peaceful borrowing than through warlike migration. The authors conclude that eliminating warlike migration would slow cultural evolution but that peaceful borrowing is a favored mechanism for culture contact and change.

In order to evaluate an adaptive justification for restriction of ritualized physical contact, the authors test association between three manifestations of physical interaction and prevalence of pathogens cross-culturally. Their expectation, supported by two of the three tested hypotheses, is that higher pathogen prevalence will lead to customs of restricted physical contact. Both cultural and biological evolution are suggested to be influential in selecting for physically intimate behaviors.

The reasons "primitive" peoples engaged in warfare are discussed. In order to resolve any inconsistencies in previous studies of warfare, this article looks closely at Textor's (1967) warfare variables and their correlations with other variables included in Textor's (1967) anthropological summary.

This paper suggests that Fischer's (1961) "male security" variable is not adequate. Cross-cultural analyses suggest that male security in the realm of father-son interaction may be more important than male security in the realm of heterosexual interaction in explaining the line shape preference of a society.

In "The Urban Revolution" (1950), V. Gordan Childe hypothesized ten traits of civilization: urban centers, occupational specialization, monumental buildings, taxation by and/or tribute to elite, isolation of ruling group(s), writing, art, long-distance trade, social solidarity reinforced through common ideologies, and state formation. The author of this study analyzes these traits, and in particular, the presence of written language, with data from two different databases, one ethnographic and one archaeological. He finds that written language is highly correlated with the other traits of civilization as hypothesized by V. Gordan Childe.