versity of Washington Press, in press).The present paper was submitted 23 ix 96 and accepted 4 iii 97; the find version reached the Editor's office 16 v 97.The application of Darwinian evolutionary theory to archaeology has taken two divergent and rather distinct paths over the past Over the past two decades, a number of programmatic two decades. According to one program, often referred to as evolutionary archaeology, cultural change as seen in the archaeologistatements advocating the application of Darwinian cal record can best be explained in terms of the direct action of theory to archaeological phenomena have appeared in natural selection and other Darwinian processes on heritable vari-the literature. According to one program, cultural ation in artifacts and behavior. The other approach, referred to as change as seen in the archaeological record can best be evolutionary or behavioral ecology, explains cultural and behavioral change as forms of phenotypic adaptation to varying social explained in terms of the direct action of natural selecand ecological conditions, using the assumption that natural setion and other Darwinian processes on heritable varialection has designed organisms to respond to local conditions in tion in artifacts and behavior (Dunnell 1980(Dunnell , 1989 fitness-enhancing ways. We argue that the primary conflict be- Leonard and Jones 1987; O'Brien and Holland 1990, tween the two approaches centers on fundamental differences in
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.