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The establisment of a national site survey in the Solomon Islands provides a case study of the way in which the discipline of archaeology, developed in highly industrialised, wealthy countries, must be adapted if it is to prove meaningful in other parts of the world. Such changes are not only organisational and logistical; they extend to the conceptual basis of archaeology and to the relationship of the discipline to society. Specifically discussed are the problems of interpreting archaeological discoveries in terms of traditional perspectives of the past, the establishment of an archaeological unit and fieldwork programme, the question of decentralisation, rescue archaeology, protective legislation, the use of archaeology within the educational system, and the role of the external researcher.

Most contemporary models of cultural change are derived from pre-Darwinian, especially Spencerian, sources and are conditioned by such unstated assumptions as typological thinking and a belief in directed, adaptive variation. This paper defends a Darwinian selectionist approach to cultural evolution. Darwinian selectionism requires undirected, heritable variation. Selection acts upon variants that are not preferentially oriented to or generated with respect to selection; evolution is the result of the selection of "randomly" generated variants. The symbolic aspects of human culture provide the type of variation required for a Darwinian cultural evolution; this system is not analogous but functionally equivalent to the genotype. Two interacting facets of cultural selection, demic and internal, are proposed. Finally, it is suggested that the genetic capacity for culture evolved by "dragging down" the fitness of noncultural forms of behavior determination.

Three categories of individuals currently interested in the recovery of prehistoric archaeological material on the Plains as well as in the United States generally, may be distinguished: the profes...

In defining "universal categories of culture," anthropologists traditionally have, for the most part, concerned themselves with real or ideal adult behavior, often leaving unrecorded or unreported the behavior of children. Except for the writings of Dennis (1940), Hilger (1951, 1952), Mead (1952, 1953), Opler (1946), and Whiting and Child (1953), the intensive investigation of child behavior in nonliterate cultures largely has been absent, with a resulting hiatus in ethnographic literature. But even in the above works, it is difficult to elicit extended discussions of the size and nature of children's immediate peer groups, thus presenting an ethnographic lacuna of considerable magnitude. It is the purpose of this paper to examine a segment of anthropological literature with a view toward eliciting explicit, or implicit, designations of immediate peer group size among children, and, if possible, indications of the nature of such groups. Eighty-two works have been examined for relevant data, consisting for the most part of standard ethnographical and ethnological accounts of nonliterate peoples. The sample was selected at random in order to give as much diversity as possible of authorship and geographical location of the various cultures. The procedure taken with the majority of the works was to examine the indices for items such as "children," "child-rearing," "boys," "girls," "life-cycle," "play," "games," "sports," "age-sets," "agegrades," "amusements," "friendship," and similar categories. Those ethnographical and ethnological accounts which lack an index, of which there are quite a few, generally either have an index-type table of contents, or a chapter such as "Social Organization," or "Life-Cycle," from which data could be drawn.