ABSTRACT

This chapter describes a complement to the work of Julian Steward. It is concerned mainly with matters of late prehistoric and early protohistoric levels of development, with suggestions about them which follow from the present very incomplete evidence. As an operational device in culture-historical theorizing, the first really clear setting forth of a distinction between an incipient agricultural and a formative village-farming community level appeared in Steward's paper on "Cultural Causality and Law". His interests were restricted to the succession of eras of development of certain early civilizations only and of regularities we might see between these different successions. From evidence which has become available since Steward wrote, it appears probable that levels of incipient agriculture were not by any means a universal phenomenon in all of the world's developmental sequences which came to include food-production. As a generality, the succession of eras or levels which Steward proposed in 1949 for southwestern Asia and Mesoamerica still seem to obtain.