![]() ![]() Accordingly, by the 1950s Steward developed an ecological framework for describing, and to some degree explaining, a particular culture. The third component Steward termed the culture core, although he later retreated from that concept. Through his ethnographic investigations on the Shoshone, Paiute, and other indigenous societies of the Great Basin and Plateau region, Steward specified three interrelated foci for field research on the cultural ecology of a particular society: the natural resources and the technology used to extract and process them from the environment the behavior and social organization involved in the labor in these subsistence and economic activities and the influence of these two sets of phenomena on other aspects of culture. The desert impressed on him the role of water in human adaptation, a recurrent theme in much of his work, particularly with regards to demographic and economic factors in the evolution of early civilizations. This contrast stimulated his interest in change through time, especially in relation to new technology and its social repercussions. This reflects his Deep Springs experience, where relatively recent Euro-American ranching and farming contrasted with the ancient foraging life styles of the original indigenous occupants, two very different modes of adaptation. Steward believed that the environment had the greatest influence on societies with less developed technology. Instead of armchair speculation and debate, Steward sought to subject the question of the relationship between culture and nature to direct empirical investigation through actual fieldwork on particular cultures in their habitat, although his own fieldwork mostly involved interviewing scattered elderly informants about their memory culture. Environmental possibilists countered that the environment presents many opportunities allowing a wide latitude for human responses in which culture is decisive. ![]() Environmental determinists argued that the natural environment strongly influences human behavior, society, culture, and history. He had avoided taking any side in the academic debate of his predecessors. Now, however, he was devoted to field research in archaeology and ethnography, and this was the formative period in the development of his cultural ecology, aspects of which can be found in many of his early publications. In the late 1920s to 1936, Steward returned several times to various areas of the high desert environment that had been such a profound attraction to him at Deep Springs School. Then Steward returned to Berkeley for graduate work in anthropology where he received a PhD in 1929. His BA degree was awarded in 1925 at Cornell. ![]() Local natural history was an integral part of school instruction and nature was part of his daily experience beyond the classroom.Īfter a freshman year at the University of California in Berkeley, Steward followed some of his fellow preparatory school students to Cornell University where he studied geology and zoology. In 1918, at the age of 16, he entered the college preparatory school in Deep Springs Valley north of Death Valley, in eastern California close to the border with Nevada and at the western edge of the Great Basin. Steward was born on January 31, 1902, in Washington, D.C. ![]()
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