Seshat (project)

The Seshat: Global History Databank is a nonprofit organization and an international scientific research project. Founded in 2011, the Seshat: Global History Databank gathers data into a single, large database that can be used to test scientific hypotheses. The Databank consults directly with expert scholars to code what historical societies and their environments were like in the form of accessible datapoints and thus forms a digital storehouse for data on the political and social organization of all human groups from the early modern back to the ancient and neolithic periods. The organizers of this research project contend that the mass of data then can be used to test a variety of competing hypotheses about the rise and fall of large-scale societies around the globe which may help science provide answers to global problems.

The Seshat: Global History Databank claims to be a scientific approach to historical research and its large dataset, though compiled with the intention of being theory-neutral, is frequently of interest to researchers of Cliodynamics. The main goal of Cliodynamics researchers is to use the scientific method to produce the data necessary to empirically test competing theories. A large interdisciplinary and international team of experts helps the Seshat project to produce a database that is historically rigorous enough to study the past using well-established scientific techniques. Seshat data may be used with sociocultural evolutionary theory or cultural evolutionary theory to identify long-term dynamics that may have had significant effects on the course of human history.

The Seshat: Global History Databank is an umbrella organization for several research projects that examine different themes or facets of human life. Each project is led by members of the Seshat Team in collaboration with a group of consultants and contributing experts. 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. The Seshat team is also heavily engaged in improving the way that cutting-edge digital technologies can aid in research, with projects devoted to developing cutting-edge systems for collecting, analyzing, and distributing information with computer assistance.

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