ABSTRACT
Frank Cushing enjoyed the confi dence of the Zuñi, but unfortunately he died before he could set down his account of their culture. Cushing’s observations have been of priceless value to archaeologists, as they work back from the present into the remote past in the American Southwest. Food production was the foundation of the world’s earliest civilizations, but agriculture did not lead, invariably, to state-organized societies or cities. As we saw in Chapter 1 , the archaeologists of a century ago often thought in linear, evolutionary terms of an inevitable ladder of human progress from simple hunting and gathering to civilization. This linear approach, with its overtones of cultural superiority and racism, was intellectually bankrupt by 1910. Multilinear evolution, developed a half century later and a common model for studying the past, likens human cultural evolution to a complex tree with many branches leading cultures in many different environments in bewilderingly diverse ways. The branching model argues that no single society, however simple or complex, is superior to another. In other words, civilization, for all its variety as well as social and technological complexity, is only one way of adapting to the world’s many environments.
