At age 16, Steward left an unhappy childhood in Washington, D.C. to attend boarding school in Deep Springs Valley, California, in the Great Basin.

Steward's "direct engagement" with the land (specifically, subsistence through irrigation and ranching) and the Northern Paiute Amerindians that lived there became a "catalyst" for his theory and method of cultural ecology.

(Kerns 1999; Murphy 1977) As an undergraduate, Steward studied for a year at UC Berkeley, with two of his professors being Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, after which he transferred to Cornell University, from which he graduated in 1925 with a B.Sc.

Steward's research interests mainly concerned "subsistence"—- the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work—- which Kroeber regarded as "eccentric", original, and innovative.

(EthnoAdmin 2003) In 1931, Steward, needing money, began fieldwork on the Great Basin Shoshone for Kroeber's Culture Element Distribution (CED) survey; in 1935 he received an appointment to the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), which published some of his most influential works.

Among them: Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938), which "fully explicated" the paradigm of cultural ecology, and helped decrease the diffusionist emphasis of American anthropology.

He questioned the possibility of creating a social theory which encompassed the entire evolution of humanity; yet, he also argued that anthropologists are not limited to description of specific, existing cultures.

Steward believed it is possible to create theories analyzing typical, common culture, representative of specific eras or regions.

It was during Steward's teaching years at Columbia, which lasted until 1952, that he wrote arguably his most important theoretical contributions: "Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations (1949b), "Area Research: Theory and Practice" (1950), "Levels of Sociocultural Integration" (1951), "Evolution and Process (1953a), and "The Cultural Study of Contemporary Societies: Puerto Rico" (Steward and Manners 1953).