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neoevolutionism

neoevolutionism noun: a school of anthropology, developed in the mid-20th century, concerned with long-term, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures.

Noun

neoevolutionism (uncountable)

  1. A school of anthropology, developed in the mid-20th century, concerned with long-term, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures.
    • The so-called neoevolutionism or cultural materialism of Childe, however, had been preserved (in the works of R. McC. Adams, Braidwood, and others), as had the environmental school of Crawford, Fox, and Clark. […] Influences from cultural anthropology—neoevolutionism and functionalism—were pulling...1977 March, Leo S. Klejn, “A Panorama of Theoretical Archaeology”, in Current Anthropology, volume 18, number 1, →DOI, page 4

Origin of neoevolutionism

From neo- + evolutionism.

Questions about neoevolutionism

What does neoevolutionism mean?
Neoevolutionism means a school of anthropology, developed in the mid-20th century, concerned with long-term, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures.
What part of speech is neoevolutionism?
Neoevolutionism is a noun.

Words near neoevolutionism in the dictionary

  1. neoeriocitrin
  2. neoethnicities
  3. neoethnicity
  4. neoeugenics
  5. neoevolution
  6. neoevolutionism
  7. neoevolutionist
  8. neoevonoside
  9. neoexpression
  10. neofan
  11. neofans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: neoevolutionism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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