When I visited Vienna for the first time many years ago, I remember experiencing a feeling of “cognitive dissonance.” On one hand, one hardly ever hears about Austria in the news—it’s one of those small, insignificant European countries (this should not be taken as a put-down; in fact

It’s been a long haul. Six years ago we launched the project that we eventually named Seshat: Global History Databank. Three years ago, following a series of workshops that designed the overall structure of the databank, we started collecting data. By January 2015 we had 30,000 record

Dear friends, lovers of history, and those who care about the world we live in: Please join me in supporting an international project that seeks to understand how human societies evolve. I am donating $10,000 from my book revenues this year to Seshat: Global History Databank, and I ch

A week ago the urban archaeologist Mike Smith wrote a scathing post about a new article in Nature.com’s journal Scientific Data. In the article, Meredith Reba and coworkers report on how they “spatialized” the dataset on urban settlements, based on previous publications by Tertius Cha

An article published this week by Nature is generating a lot of press. Using a sample of 93 Austronesian cultures Watts et al. explore the possible relationship between human sacrifice (HS) and the evolution of hierarchical societies. Specifically, they test the “social control” hypot

This week I gave a talk at the workshop, organized by Chris Chase-Dunn and Hiroko Inoue at the University of California in Riverside. The talk was about the current status of Seshat: Global History Databank. As I was preparing the talk, I read an article in the Atlantic about digital

Last four weeks I’ve been traveling all over Europe. After leaving Vienna (I wrote about the conference on The Haves and Have Nots in my previous post), I went to Moscow, then to Oxford, to Oslo, back to Oxford, and finally to southern Portugal. Most of these trips involved attending

link to the journal issue Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015 Articles Modeling Strategic Decisions in the Formation of the Early Neo-Assyrian Empire Baudains, Peter; Zamazalová, Silvie; Altaweel, Mark; Wilson, Alan Agricult

  Earlier this month we ran a semi-annual general meeting of the Seshat project in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This came about because prior to our own meeting, many of us participated in another workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, and since we were there anyway, we decided to stay in

Comments on Part I tended to take a rather negative view of the argument advanced by Baumard et al. Thus, Gene Anderson questioned whether Confucianism is even a religion. It was certainly a moralistic teaching, but how important a role did supernatural agents play in it is very much