" Methodology of Comparison in Evolutionary Archaeology (with Hector Neff senior author). Chapter in Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory in Archaeological Explanation", ed. E. Barton and G.A. Clark. Archaeology Papers of the American Anthropological Association, No. 7:75-95, 1997.

Abstract. Evolutionary archaeology needs methods for recognizing how selective retention of cultural variation shaped the archaeological record. One approach that has not yet been exploited fully is to derive adaptive hypotheses from evolutionary design arguments, then to test the hypotheses' predictions by comparing two or more segments of the archaeological record. In order to encourage further development of comparative methods, we discuss aspects of their application within evolutionary archaeology in this paper. We also present an example in which comparative observations are used to test a hypothesis about the evolution of local productive specialization and circulation of materials through space.

We refer to this new way of looking at evolution as the "Comparative Studies in Scientific Anthropology". Our approach is modeled after the comparative approach which has been widely recognized in biology for the last decade. We specifically argue that anthropology must be grounded in scientific methods and we propose an alternative way to view theory in anthropology.