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Author(s): Turchin, Peter; Hoyer, Daniel; Bennett, James; Basava, Kiran; Cioni, Enrico; Feeney, Kevin; Francois, Pieter; Holder, Samantha; Levine, Jill; Nugent, Selin; Reddish, Jenny; Thorpe, Chelsea; Wiltshire, Sal; Whitehouse, Harvey | Abstract: This report describes the current canonical time-series dataset named “Equinox2020,” a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data for a well-curated list of polities and variables available on the Seshat Data Browser. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Equinox2020 dataset.

Copyright © 2015, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Enquiries

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the study of out-of-body experiences (obes) by cognitive and neuro-scientists. Nowadays, far-reaching claims regarding the uncovering of the neural mechanisms and pathways, as well as the mystery ofobes in the anthropological and historical record are on offer. In this article the implicit assumption thatobes are much better understood and that real progress has been made are questioned on the basis of the definitional and conceptual problems that still haunt this area of research. It is suggested that progress will only be registered once the spectrum of out-of-body phenomena (obp) is recognized and attention is paid to the neurocultural complexity of distinct instances ofobes.

This article analyses how nineteenth-century British visitors of Waterloo anticipated, experienced and explained their visit of 'the field'. The article shows how British visitors attempted to claim ownership over Waterloo and to legitimise their own commemorative practices by simultaneously searching for authenticity and longing for the familiarity (and commercialisation) of the 'beaten track'. By doing so this article calls for a shift in our understanding of nineteenth-century British Waterloo tourism. The view that emphasises the succession of an early generation of authentic travellers by a later generation of 'mere' tourists is replaced by a view which sees the desire for authenticity and the need for the familiar as two forces which were continuously negotiated in creative ways by travellers throughout the whole nineteenth century.

This article analyses the views of British travellers of the Belgian past for the period 1830–70. The article explores how the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and the closely intertwined rise of contemporary British sympathy for Belgium led to a reinterpretation of the ‘Belgian’ past. After 1830, the British interpretation of the Belgian past was increasingly centred on the sixteenth century and the ‘true’ Belgian national identity was believed to have been oppressed by a chain of foreign oppressors. Furthermore, the travellers saw the Belgian past and national identity as very similar to the British past and national identity. The view of the Belgian past was an integral part of the view of the Belgian future; a future that, so it was believed, would justify British claims that Belgium was a ‘little Britain on the Continent’ and that the Belgian and British national identities were highly similar. Finally, the article also explains why the interpretation of the Belgian past did not change once more af...

Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet the focus has primarily been on current or future conditions. In this paper, we argue for a “bottom-up” approach that estimates productivity, or potential productivity based on information about the agricultural practices and technologies used in past societies. Of key theoretical interest is using this information to estimate the carrying capacity of a given region, independently of estimates of population size. We outline how explicit crop yield models can be combined with high quality historical and archaeological information about past societies, in order to infer the temporal and geographic patterns of change in agricultural productivity and potential. We discuss the kinds of information we need to collect about agricultural techniques and practices in the past, and introduce a new databank initiative we have developed for collating the best available historical and archaeological evidence. A key benefit of our approach lies in making explicit the steps in the process of estimating past productivities and carrying capacities, and in being able to assess the effects of different modelling assumptions. This is undoubtedly an ambitious task, yet promises to provide important insights into fundamental aspects of past societies, and will enable us to test more rigorously key hypotheses about human socio-cultural evolution.

The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of ultrasociality to be tested rigorously. In addition to describing the methodology informing the set-up of the database, our article introduces four hypotheses that we intend to test using the database. These hypotheses focus on the resource base, warfare, ritual, and religion, respectively. Ultimately the aim of our database is to offer a ‘rapid discovery science’ route to the study of the past. We believe our approach is not only highly complementary with existing traditions of enquiry in history and archaeology but will extend their intellectual scope and explanatory power.

This article analyses the different British views of, and attitudes towards, Belgium during the period 1830–70. The rise and fall of the myth of Belgium as ‘a little Britain on the Continent’ is central in this analysis. This myth originated during the first years after the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and represented a major U-turn in British sympathies. It was built around Belgium's supposed gratitude towards Britain, its liberalism, constitutionalism and the close ties between the royal families of both countries. Furthermore, the British believed that British and Belgian national identity were very similar and that the nature of Belgian national identity was inherently Protestant. However, during the eighteen-fifties and sixties, disagreement on free trade, on France and on the continuing strength of Belgian Catholicism, led to Belgium becoming seen as just ‘another’ continental country.

The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needs.