Based on Bates' Cultural Anthropology, this text provides a framework for analyzing cultures based on their economic systems.

Cultural ecology is the study of human behavior and culture within an environmental context. It examines how humans adapt to their environment and how the environment shapes culture. Based on a selection of materials from Bates' and Fratkin's Cultural Anthropology, Second Edition , Human Adaptive Strategies uses case studies to show how cultures evolved within the context of their environment and how their methods of surviving in their environment have affected other aspects of their culture. One reviewer says, “Concentrating, as the book does, on subsistence patterns and cultural ecology, it creates a conceptual structure conducive to the needs of the introductory student in anthropology.”