The Seshat: Global History Databank is an umbrella organization for numerous research projects that examine different facets or themes of human life. Each project is headed by various members of the Seshat Team along with a group of consultants and contributing experts (see Who We Are for more information).
Themes include: the evolution of social complexity in early civilizations, the creation of prosociality (i.e., how and why large groups of unrelated individuals come together and cooperate for a common goal), the role of ritual and religion in social cohesion, the causes of economic growth and its consequences on individual's well-being, and many others.
We are also heavily engaged in improving the way that digital technologies can aid in research, with projects devoted to developing cutting-edge systems for collecting, analyzing, and distributing information with computer assistance.
All of the material gathered by this research is stored in our Databank. We posted our first downloadable datasets in 2018 and have continued publishing data for public use. More data releases are planned for the future.
The work on these projects is made possible by generous contributions from a range of governmental, academic, and private funding agencies (see Acknowledgements).
