This article hypothesizes that ritual ecstasy was selected for as a way for hunter-gatherers to cope with resource uncertainty by unifying separate groups. Results support this hypothesis and suggest a relationship between resource stress and deities as well as dependence on animals and presence of zoomorphic deities.

A materialist approach is used to study the status of women in hunter-gatherer groups. Techno-ecological factors are tested as predictors of women's status.

Researchers examine the ethnographic record, sampling 82 hunter gatherer societies from the HRAF World Cultures database, for cross-cultural patterns of archaeological evidence of knowledge of astronomy and constellations. Surveying the data, researchers identified many patterns in the upper paleolithic, noting the importance of further examination of this topic.

Recent research has suggested a co-evolutionary relationship exists between religion and economic complexity. The goal of this study is to examine religion as a driver of economic complexity in the North American archaeological record. Building on and critiquing prominent theories like niche construction, Brian Hayden’s paleo-political ecology (PPE), and Watts et al. 2022 model, this study concludes that religion should not be considered a driver in this dataset but should not be left out of future considerations.

This article posits that nuclear, independent families are more common under certain economic conditions that affect food supply, demand for family labor, physical mobility, and property system. Empirical analysis suggests that nuclear, independent families are associated with hunting and gathering subsistence type and low social stratification.

The author uses a world-wide sample of societies to address variation in famiy organization and the economic and social factors to which it relates.

The goal of this paper is two-fold: first, a review of some of the suggestions that anthropologists have made to improve classifications of residence is presented. Second, matri-patrilocality is examined in order to illustrate the importance of considering life cycle events in interpretations of residence patterns.

This study examines how social structure, political organization, and intersocietal relations may affect the incidence of internal warfare (between culturally similar political communities). Results show that in uncentralized political systems, fraternal interest groups and unauthorized raiding parties may increase the incidence of internal war.

This chapter explores and tests some propositions about matrilineal societies. Supplementary to that discussion, the author also explores the problems of method associated with the use of coded data on large samples of cultures.

This study investigates the presence of feuding, arguing that a solely evolutionary or functional approach misses important inter-societal factors. Results indicate that while fraternal interest groups are associated with feuding, the presence of war and level of political integration also increase the likelihood of feuding.