Worldwide cross-cultural studies and their relevance for archaeology

Archaeological inference based on ethnographic analogy may or may not be correct. What is worse, there is no systematic way to tell. With certain provisos, it is better to generate archaeological inference from the results of worldwide cross-cultural tests of relational hypotheses. Such tests may provide more benefits than within-region comparisons. This paper discusses a number of ways in which worldwide cross-cultural research may be used in archaeological inference, including: generalizing about societal types, inferring from presumed causes, inferring from material correlates, and inferring from noncausal associations. The paper concludes with a discussion of how comparative archaeology could help cross-cultural researchers test causal theories diachronically.