This article investigates a broad hypothesis that cultural traits diversify with sociocultural development. Results suggest that sociocultual development is associated with certain aspects of aesthetic and ritual culture, and that cultural elaboration may be correlated with some sexual norms and tendency toward cannibalism, human sacrifice, and slavery.

This article proposes three stages of slavery: dominance slavery, temporary decline of slavery, and economic slavery. Dominance slavery refers to the enslavement of war captives while economic slavery entails a legally codified slave class in a more economically stratified society. Mann-Whitney summed-rank tests suggest that economic slavery is associated with higher socioeconomic development, here defined in terms of male-dominance rather than equidominance in a society.

This article presents the results of a new method of ordinal scaling that the author proposes is an ordinal analogue of multidimensional curvilinear factor analysis. The method identifies traits that reach a maximum level of development and then decline (D-type) and traits that do not decline after reaching a maximum (P-type). Male-dominant and equidominant/female-dominant societies are analyzed separately. Several cultural traits are examined.

Using principal-components analysis, the author develops an Index of Sociocultural Development that measures the same concepts as Carneiro’s Index of Cultural Accumulation. Carneiro’s index also contains a measure of cultural elaboration which the author suggests examining further.