The last two decades have seen a proliferation of research frameworks that emphasise the importance of understanding adaptive processes that happen at different levels. We contribute to this growing body of literature by exploring how cultural (mal)adaptive dynamics relate to multilevel social-ecological processes occurring at different scales, where the lower levels combine into new units with new organizations, functions, and emergent properties or collective behaviors. After a brief review of the concept of “cultural adaptation” from the perspective of cultural evolutionary theory, the core of the paper is constructed around the exploration of multilevel processes occurring at the temporal, spatial, social, and political scales. We do so by using insights from cultural evolutionary theory and by examining small-scale societies as case studies. In each section, we discuss the importance of the selected scale for understanding cultural adaptation and then present an example that illustrates how multilevel processes in the selected scale help explain observed patterns in the cultural adaptive process. The last section of the paper discusses the potential of modeling and computer simulation for studying multilevel processes in cultural adaptation. We conclude by highlighting how elements from cultural evolutionary theory might enrich the multilevel process discussion in resilience theory.

This paper resulted from discussions at the ICREA Workshop “Small-Scale Societies and Environmental Transformations: Coevolutionary Dynamics” funded by ICREA Conference Awards. VRG acknowledges financial support from ERC grant agreement No. FP7-261971-LEK and from the CONSOLIDER SimulPast Project (CSD2010-00034). ALB worked on this paper on a contract from the Juan de la Cierva Programme (JCI-2011-10734, MICINN-MINECO, Spain) and on a research fellowship from The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This work contributes to the ICTA Unit of Excellence (MinECo, MDM2015-0552).