Over the past decade, niche construction theory (NCT) has been one of the fastest-growing theories or scholarly approaches in the social sciences, especially within archaeology. It was proposed in the biological sciences 25 years ago and is often referred to as a neglected evolutionary mechanism. Given its rapid acceptance by the archaeological community, it is important that scholars consider how it is being applied and look for discrepancies between applications of the concept. Many critical discussions of NCT have already been published, but most of them are in biology journals and may be overlooked by scholars in the social sciences. In this manuscript, my goal is to synthesis the criticisms of NCT, better allowing archaeologists to independently evaluate its usefulness. I focus on the claims of novelty and differences between NCT and other approaches to conceptualizing anthropogenic ecosystem impacts and culture-evolution feedbacks. I argue that the diverse concepts currently included in the wide-reaching purview of NCT are not new, but the terminology is and may be useful to some scholars. If proponents of the concept are able to unify their ideas, it may serve a descriptive function, but given that lack of a testable explanatory mechanism, it does not have a clear heuristic function.

在过去的十年中，生态位构建理论 (NCT) 一直是社会科学中发展最快的理论或学术方法之一，尤其是在考古学中。它是 25 年前在生物科学中提出的，通常被称为一种被忽视的进化机制。鉴于它被考古界迅速接受，学者们考虑它是如何被应用并寻找该概念应用之间的差异是很重要的。许多关于 NCT 的批判性讨论已经发表，但大多数都在生物学期刊上，可能会被社会科学学者忽视。在这份手稿中，我的目标是综合对 NCT 的批评，更好地让考古学家能够独立评估其有用性。我专注于 NCT 与其他概念化人为生态系统影响和文化进化反馈的方法之间的新颖性和差异的主张。我认为，目前包含在 NCT 广泛范围内的各种概念并不新鲜，但这些术语对一些学者来说是有用的，并且可能有用。如果概念的支持者能够统一他们的想法，它可能会起到描述功能，但由于缺乏可测试的解释机制，它没有明确的启发功能。