A brief review of research on women's status is presented. Predictions are tested about women's choice of occupation in relation to levels of social complexity.

This paper examines three measures of cultural complexity: Naroll’s (1956) social development index, Freeman’s (1957) Guttman scale of folk-urbanism, and Carneiro and Tobias’ (1963) Guttman scale of cultural complexity. The authors find significant associations between these three measures, suggesting that their strong validity. When used together, these measures account for a culture’s urbanization, organizational ramification, occupational specialization, and cumulative informational content of culture.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the four available listings of the definitions of settlement size as it is used as a measure of societal complexity. The definitions come from the previously published works of Tatje and Naroll (1970), Naroll and Divale (n.d.), Naroll (1956), and Ember (1963).

This paper is an investigation into the relationship between social differentiation as a proxy for societal 'development' and various categories of crime. A positive relationship is interpreted by the author as empirical cross-cultural support for Durkheim's theory that these two factors will increase together as parallel processes of 'sociocultural evolution'.

This paper discusses the relationship between floor area and settlement population.

This article reviews sociological and psychological explanations of suicide, focusing on a thwarting disorientation theory. This theory posits that a person who commits suicide is likely to have lost social ties and perceived someone to blame for that loss. The author examines seven cultural traits (wife-beating, marriage restrictions, divorce freedom, witchcraft accusation, drunken brawling, defiant homicide, and frequent warfare) that can cause thwarting disorientation.

Drawing from Social Darwinism theories, this article posits warfare (specifically, military success) as a selective mechanism in the evolution of culture. The hypothesis was not supported.

This paper investigates two mechanisms of cultural evolution: peaceful diffusion and warlike migration. Two societies, one for each mechanism, were compared to a base society on 11 culture traits. Eight of the 11 traits diffused more readily through peaceful borrowing than through warlike migration. The authors conclude that eliminating warlike migration would slow cultural evolution but that peaceful borrowing is a favored mechanism for culture contact and change.

In "The Urban Revolution" (1950), V. Gordan Childe hypothesized ten traits of civilization: urban centers, occupational specialization, monumental buildings, taxation by and/or tribute to elite, isolation of ruling group(s), writing, art, long-distance trade, social solidarity reinforced through common ideologies, and state formation. The author of this study analyzes these traits, and in particular, the presence of written language, with data from two different databases, one ethnographic and one archaeological. He finds that written language is highly correlated with the other traits of civilization as hypothesized by V. Gordan Childe.

This study takes an economic approach in examining the practice of human sacrifice as it relates to notions of the economic value of human life. Codes are included.