ArticleScientific data2026
Carneiro's global dataset of cultural traits in ethnographic and historical societies: a digital edition.
Article in Scientific data, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
The late Robert L. Carneiro was a prominent anthropologist who devoted his life to the study of political evolution and the evolution of complex societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, he and his colleagues created a cross-cultural dataset for their Scale Analysis project, collecting ethnographic and historical data on hundreds of cultural traits in more than a hundred societies worldwide. Although Carneiro presented the results of the project in several papers, the dataset itself has not yet been published. Here we present a digital version of two editions of the dataset, based on Carneiro's documentation stored in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. The 4th edition contains 127 societies and 354 cultural traits, and the 6th edition features 74 societies and 618 traits. Both represent unique sets of coded cross-cultural information that can be used as a comparative source to other cross-cultural datasets, as a starting point for one's own collection of cross-cultural data, and for quantitative testing of cultural evolutionary hypotheses.
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