[1][2] He is mostly known for his Circumscription theory which explains how early political states may have formed as a result of interactions between environmental constraints, population pressures, and warfare.
As a graduation gift, his father (who hoped his son would run the family business someday) arranged for a trip around the globe on an ocean liner.
[5] Traveling the world, however, had more fueled Carneiro's interest in anthropology, so he returned to the University of Michigan to become White's graduate student.
His graduate research took him to Brazil where fieldwork with an indigenous people, the Kuikuro, revealed large earthworks and ancient trenches.
Carneiro worked toward a general theory, to explain the emergence of political culture, strongly opposed to humanistic and non-scientific tendencies in anthropology[6] and to history for its lack of scientific approach.