An Agenda for Research on the Evolution (and Devolution) of Social Complexity What follows is my report on the workshop Evolution of Social Complexity that I organized at Complexity Science Hub-Vienna, October 2–3, 2017. Over the past 10,000 years human societies evolved from “simple” – small egalitarian groups, integrated by face-to-face interactions – to “complex” […]

Last week, 300 researchers from around the world attended the inaugural conference of the newly formed Cultural Evolution Society in Jena, Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (also newly formed, in 2014). Three Seshat members attended: yours truly plus two of the three Founding Directors, Peter Turchin and Pieter […]

Innovations in computer science help open the field of possibilities for archaeologists; and support ambitious projects like the Seshat: Global History Databank. ALIGNED’s Dacura platform is an exciting new development in the field of computational archaeology. The Seshat project’s board of directors along with consultant and archaeologist Peter Peregrine and former director Rob Brennan have […]

We get a lot of questions about the technology behind Seshat: Global History Databank. The Databank sits atop a cutting-edge digital infrastructure designed specifically to store, organize, curate, and analyze complex multi-dimensional information; the sort of information we deal with as part of our historical research at Seshat. The infrastructure system is called Dacura. Dacura […]

Since the inception of the project, Seshat research assistants have been collecting data relating to agricultural practices in the past. As with all aspects of the Seshat codebook, the intention is that the data collected will be used to understand broader social organization in the past. The scale of a society, in terms of the […]

Why do so many groups require their members to endure painful group rituals, ranging from demeaning hazing in fraternities to bloody self-flagellations in some religious traditions (like being nailed to a cross)? And why do people not remove themselves from such groups and the risk of injury. Or for that matter, why would anyone remain […]

Understanding the Seshat data gathering and curating workflows Readers of this blog series are familiar with both the philosophy of the Seshat project and the tremendous potential of the Seshat Databank. What could be more clear is how we actually put together the databank. Inevitably we had to make some important conceptual and practical choices […]

As a species, humans have an extraordinary ability to cooperate in large groups. Seshat director Peter Turchin recently shared his theories on the evolution of cooperation in large-scale human groups and its link to both the field of Cliodynamics and Seshat: Global History Databank in a webinar hosted by the Evolution Institute for project donors and collaborators. […]

On the 18th of April, Prof. Harvey Whitehouse and Dr. Pieter Francois, two out of three of the Seshat: Global History Databank founders, rendezvoused with Dr. Patrick Savage (a postdoctoral researcher working on Seshat) and myself (research assistant) at the prestigious University of Tokyo. However, this meeting was not to gather data or collect information […]

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 records (a “Seshat record” says what the value of […]