(1973) is associated with the term. In his Theory ofCulture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955), cultural ecologyrepresents the "ways in which culture change is induced by adaptation to theenvironment."It is this assertion - that the physical and biological environment affects culture - thathad proved controversial, because it implies an element of environmental determinismover human actions, which some social scientists find problematic, particularly thosewriting from a Marxist perspective. Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological locale plays a significant role in shaping the cultures of a region.. Steward's method was to:document the technologies & methods used to exploit the environment - to get aliving from it,look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using theenvironment. assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspectsof culture (e.g., how, in a drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall patternsmeant this became central to everyday life, and led to the development of a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very strongly. This belief systemmay not appear in a society where good rainfall for crops can be taken for granted,or where irrigation was practiced).Steward's ideas of cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists andarchaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they would later be critiqued fortheir environmental determinism. Cultural ecology was one of the central tenets anddriving factors in the development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, asarchaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of environmentaladaptation