Dynamics of Cultural Evolution

Michael Rosenberg is a retired Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, Wilmington, USA. His primary research interests are the mechanics of cultural evolution and understanding the beginnings of food production, settled village life, and social complexity in the context of those mechanics. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, he participated in the Tigris-Euphrates Archaeological Reconnaissance Project in Anatolia, Turkey and in the late 1990s he discovered and directed the salvage excavations at the early Neolithic sites of Hallan Çemi and Demirköy in southeastern Turkey. He has published over 40 journal articles in reputed journals, and several book chapters in edited volumes with international publishers.

• - 1. Introduction. - 2. The Evolution of Evolutionary Theory in Biology. - 3. Borrowing from Biology. - 4. That Complex Whole: The Structure of Culture and the Kinds of Cultural and Culturally Structured Entities. - 5. That Complex Whole and its Evolutionary Dynamics. - 6. The Deaths and Births of Cultural Systems. - 7. Chance, Agency, and Loaded Dice. - 8. Proximate Causation and Pattern Part I: The Paths to Food Production. - 9. Proximate Causation and Pattern Part 2: The Paths to Social Complexity. - 10. Agency, Proximate Causation, and the Sloshing Bucket.