lightning talk

Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

September 11, 2024

Durham, United Kingdom

Carneiro’s database: old new dataset for cultural evolution research

keywords:

cultural complexity

cross-cultural dataset

cultural evolution

Abstract:

The late Robert L. Carneiro was a prominent cultural evolutionist who devoted his life to the study of the evolution of complex societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, he and his colleagues created a cross-cultural database for their Scale Analysis project. Although Carneiro published the results in several papers, the database itself never saw the light of day. Recently, we found the dataset in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History and decided to digitise it and make it publicly available online. The dataset was produced in several versions, with the latest one containing 618 binary cultural traits (presence/absence) for a global sample of 72 historically and ethnographically documented societies. The cultural traits are very diverse and include subsistence, settlement, architecture, economics, social and political organisation, warfare, religion, pottery, tools, metalworking, watercraft and law. This lightning talk will introduce Carneiro’s database and illustrate how it can be used to study of cultural evolution.

Speaker's social media:

Twitter: @VaclavHrncir

Downloads

SlidesTranscript English (automatic)

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