An extension of the author's 1993 study, An Archaeological Correlate of War, this study examines the relationship between community permeability and war in the ethnographic record using Naroll's study on household and population as a model with the aim of making inferences to the archaeological record.

This article retests several hypotheses from Swanson’s (1960) study on the origins of religious belief. The author finds support for an association between high gods and large communities, multiple levels of political hierarchy, and social differentiation. No support is found for Swanson’s other hypotheses concerning polytheism, ancestral spirits, reincarnation, the soul, witchcraft, and morality and their relations to social, political, and economic variables.

This study replicates John L. Fischer's (1961) cross-cultural analysis to demonstrate the correlation between art styles and social hierarchy and postmarital residence. The author suggests that archaeological ceramics might be used to predict social characteristics of prehistoric societies.

This study examines the change in political integration over time. Results show that political integration has increased during the past 12,000 years following a quadratic curve. Authors suggest that, following this quadratic model, a world state is likely to appear by AD 5000.

This study tests the hypotheses that games of strategy will be more prevalent in societies where political power is based on a "network strategy" and that network societies place more value on the enculturation of obedience in children. Both hypotheses are supported.

This article stresses the use of multivariate analysis to study the emergence of states. The authors first discuss how social inequality, population density, and trade affect state development. Next, they turn to a time series regression to formally examine social stratification, urbanization, technological specialization as predictors of political integration. Finally, economic vulnerability and scalar stress are considered as possible underlying factors in the emergence of states.

Using the ethnographic record, this study develops and tests the idea that community permeability may be used as an archaeological predictor of warfare. With the exception of pastoral societies, community permeability predicts warfare.

This article tests for universal patterns in cultural evolution by Guttman scaling on two different worldwide samples of archaeological traditions and on well-known archaeological sequences. The evidence is generally consistent with universal evolutionary sequences.

This article draws from previous research by Ember and Ember (1992) that suggests a relationship between socialization for mistrust in others, unpredictable natural disasters, and warfare frequency. Authors hypothesize that the inclusion of a corporate-network strategy variable will improve the predictive power of the Embers' model for warfare. Results support this hypothesis.

This article employs archaeoethnology to investigate possible patterns of synchronous population growth among cities of the prehistoric New World. The author finds a pattern of settlement synchrony distinct from a pattern found in the prehistoric Old World, suggesting that global climate change may not be a key factor in understanding settlement synchrony. Macroregional political and economic processes such as long-distance trade are offered as partial explanations of settlement synchrony in the New World.