HRAF Academic Quarterly, Vol 2025-03
By Francine Barone
This summary features some of the exciting research accomplished using HRAF data from the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases as well as Explaining Human Culture (EHC), Teaching eHRAF, and other open access materials from HRAF. If you would like to stay informed of the latest eHRAF research, sign up here to receive an email when our next summary is available.
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This edition of the HRAF Academic Quarterly features cross-cultural research including a global ethnographic and linguistic database on blowguns; hunter-gatherer children at school; the effects of starvation and famine on eating habits worldwide; the causal effect of gender on education and inheritance in sub-Saharan Africa; and how revenge and punishment perpetuate armed conflicts. There are two articles focusing on research methods and design: one on the relationship between climate and human behavior in the past, and one on the relationship between religion and morality in evolutionary social science. From Archaeology, new research explores the significance of textiles used in funeral rites; human tool-making skill acquisition; and lime use in hide processing by the Ancestral Puebloan people of northwestern Arizona. This quarter, HRAF anthropologist Teferi Abate Adem co-authored an article on spiritual practices along the Abay River in Ethiopia, and HRAF Vice President Michael Fischer co-presented a paper on built and un-built infrastructure at InfraNorth 2025.
Featured Research
A global database on blowguns with links to geography and language
Gabriel Aguirre-Fernández, Chiara Barbieri, Stephen C. Jett, Jorge D. Carrillo-Briceño, Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra
The blowgun is a weapon that employs the force of breath for expelling a projectile and has been traditionally used for hunting and (occasionally) war. The use of blowguns extends to ancient times and is advantageous in dense-forest areas of South America and South East Asia. A classification system of blowgun types introduced in 1948 for South America is extended here. We assembled a global database that includes collection data and ethnographic accounts of blowgun types and other related features that were linked to available linguistic information. Our analyses show that geography explains the distribution of blowgun types to some degree, but within regions of the world it is possible to identify cultural connections. Darts are by far the most used projectiles and in combination with toxins (e.g. curare), these weapons reach their highest potential. A case study on the use of blowguns in groups of Austronesian language speakers shows clade-specific preferences across the tree. Our comprehensive database provides a general overview of large-scale patterns and suggests that incorporation of other related data (e.g. sights, mouthpieces, quivers) would enhance the understanding of fine-scale cultural patterns.
Hunter-Gatherer Children at School: A View From the Global South
Velina Ninkova, Jennifer Hays, Noa Lavi, Aishah Ali, Silvia Lopes da Silva Macedo, Helen Elizabeth Davis, Sheina Lew-Levy
Universal formal education is a major global development goal. Yet hunter-gatherer communities have extremely low participation rates in formal schooling, even in comparison with other marginalized groups. Here, we review the existing literature to identify common challenges faced by hunter-gatherer children in formal education systems in the Global South. We find that hunter-gatherer children are often granted extensive personal autonomy, which is at odds with the hierarchical culture of school. Hunter-gatherer children face economic, infrastructural, social, cultural, and structural barriers that negatively affect their school participation. While schools have been identified as a risk to the transmission of hunter-gatherer values, languages, and traditional knowledge, they are also viewed by hunter-gatherer communities as a source of economic and cultural empowerment. These observations highlight the need for hunter-gatherer communities to decide for themselves the purpose school serves, and whether children should be compelled to attend.
The Effects of Hunger, Starvation and Famine on Certain Eating Habits: A Cross-Cultural Study
Robert Dirks
This paper examines the impact of starvation and famine on certain eating habits. These include commensal relations within households, dispositions towards eating with strangers and modes of appetite expression. It tests the proposition that much of the variation seen in these aspects of eating behavior worldwide can be explained by societal experiences with hunger. The study analyzes data from 124 societies and finds significant associations between episodes of food insufficiency and non-inclusive, uncongenial eating practices. This research contributes to the understanding of how food supply and nutritional circumstances shape cultural arrangements and offers insights into the broader implications of food scarcity on human relations.
Sibling Gender, Inheritance Customs and Educational Attainment
Matthew Collins
This study identifies the causal effect of second-born gender on the education of first-born children and how it varies across traditional inheritance customs in 27 sub-Saharan African countries. When customs dictate that sons do not inherit from fathers, having a brother causes a 0.05 SD reduction in education. For boys who inherit, having a brother reduces inheritance, for which parents substitute greater educational investments. For first-born girls whose brother can inherit, having a brother causes a 0.028 SD reduction in education. Exploiting national legal reforms, I show that sibling gender effects converge when all children can inherit from their parents.
Herding, Armed Conflict, and a Culture of Honor: Global Evidence
Yiming Cao, Benjamin Enke, Armin Falk, Paola Giuliano, Nathan Nunn
We examine the importance of norms of revenge and punishment in perpetuating armed conflicts. Our analysis leverages the ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, which posits that traditional herding practices generate moral systems conducive to revenge-taking. We find that the descendants of herders (i) experience more frequent civil and non-civil conflicts; (ii) are more likely to be involved in conflicts motivated by retaliation; and (iii) exhibit a greater emphasis on revenge-taking in contemporary surveys and historical folklore. Our evidence suggests that a traditional form of subsistence generated a functional morality that continues to shape conflict across the globe today.
Methods, Models &Theory
Climate and Human Behavior Studies for Our Warming World: An Introduction to the Models, Methods, and Data
Scott E. Ingram
This article is an introduction and guide to investigating past relationships between climate and human behavior. Improving understanding of these relationships is essential as humanity confronts the challenges of our warming world. However, how to investigate potential climatic influences on human behavior in the past is rarely presented or discussed as a distinct mode of inquiry. This article aims to fill this gap by providing a practical tool kit for students, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other historically focused social scientists. It is structured as a series of seven key steps to creating a research design for a climate and human behavior study, from identifying research questions to presenting results. Most of the conceptual models, methods, data, and examples provided have worldwide relevance and are informed by the long history of climate and human behavior studies in the North American Southwest. By expanding competence in this domain, we can enrich documentation and interpretations of the past and insights will emerge that will contribute to preparing for and responding to our warming world.
Morality and the Gods
Benjamin Grant Purzycki
The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences. This Element probes how the social sciences have addressed this relationship by detailing how theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. Sections 1 and 2 examine the historical roots of cross-cultural inquiry and Section 3 addresses the empirical tools developed to address cross-cultural patterns statistically. Sections 4-6 address how the contemporary evolutionary social sciences have been addressing the role religious cognition, behaviour, and beliefs play on moral conduct. By critically examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, this Element shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. It argues that the relationship between religion and morality is, despite considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.
Archaeology
Fabrics and Funerals: An Ethnographic Enquiry
Estella Weiss-Krejci
In recent years, textiles have become an increasingly relevant category for archaeological burial analysis. However, their ideological and socio-religious dimensions have not yet been satisfactorily explored. The present study provides a cross-regional ethnographic overview of the different types and uses of textiles and skins in the various phases of funeral rites. It is based on data from about 50 societies from all over the world, mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, selected from the eHRAF World Cultures database. The study confirms that in the case of a regular burial, it can almost always be assumed that the deceased was clothed. It also shows that the mourning dress worn by the bereaved is not only often the opposite of everyday dress, but is also subject to conventions that reflect the economic status and kinship of the bereaved. Above all, it suggests that there is a close link between the specific use of textiles on the body of the deceased and the eschatological concepts of a society. The study advocates the exploration of ethnographic data for a better overall understanding of the significance of textiles in funerals.
Homo faber in the making: Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of human toolmaking skill acquisition
Cheng Liu (Emory University PhD Thesis in Anthropology)
Toolmaking, together with bipedalism and language, was once regarded as a defining feature that makes humans distinct from other species. Although this notion of human uniqueness has been challenged in the past decades by mounting evidence of toolmaking by non-human primates and corvids, it is undoubtedly still critical to human experience in the sense that a biocultural feedback loop is formed through toolmaking that shapes our minds and bodies. Yet the ability to make tools is not born with us, and we all need to either learn from others or through repeated trials and errors. To better understand the diversity and universality in the process of human toolmaking skill acquisition, my article-based dissertation combines multiple lines of analyses ranging from ethnography through experiment to archaeology.
Exploring Potential Lime Use in Hide Processing on the Shivwits Plateau: An Archaeological, Experimental, and Microbiological Approach
Karen G. Harry, Manuel De Cespedes Molina, Liam Frink, Jonathan K. Covington, Cale O. Seymour, Daniel Perez, Brian P. Hedlund
Archaeological research on the Shivwits Plateau, northwestern Arizona, suggests that the Ancestral Puebloan inhabitants of that area engaged in both hide processing and the heat treatment of calcareous stones. This paper proposes a connection between these two activities, arguing that (at least some of) the heated rocks were transformed into lime for use in hide preparation. We suggest that the decision to use lime was influenced by local social and environmental conditions, and arose from an intimate familiarity with the landscape and a sophisticated understanding of lime, hides, and pathogens. Once adopted, however, this practice would have provided several benefits. Specifically, experimental results show that soaking hides in a lime solution, compared to plain water, significantly reduces bacterial growth—including pathogens—by several orders of magnitude, and decreases dehairing time by more than fivefold. We argue that these health and time-saving advantages would have been particularly valuable given the logistical challenges faced by the Shivwits Plateau people in hide processing, and that the Ancestral Puebloan people, drawing on generations of Indigenous scientific knowledge, would have keenly understood them.
HRAF Research
Aspects of local beliefs, spiritual practices and rituals performed along Abay River in Ethiopia
Abraham Geneta, Teferi Abate Adem, Yihenew Alemu Tesfaye
This ethnographic research explores local people’s cultural interactions with Abay River through systematic analysis of religious beliefs, rituals and sacrificial practices. We relied on interpretive understanding of cultural, and to some extent historical information, collected by a combination of in-depth interviews and participant observation, among communities in Wetet Abay area. Interviews and daily observational notes were interpreted collectively using the methods of content and thematic analysis. The findings reveal that Abay in the eyes of local people is simultaneously imbued with holy powers and untamed supernatural beings. This perception has made Abay a religiously and spiritually significant site for invoking the mediation and protection of supernatural forces through rituals and sacrifices conducted along the river. Despite the overall decline in the frequency and regularity of magico-religious rituals and sacrifices along the river, the imagery of Abay as religiously holy and home of powerful invisible beings affecting the welfare of humans remains enduring.
Dynamics of Built and Unbuilt Infrastructure through Cultural Extensions
Presented at InfraNorth Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities, University of Vienna, September 2025: Beyond Infrastructure? (Un-)built Environments in the Anthropocene
Michael D. Fischer, Sally A. Applin
Societal adaptations to innovations drive the emergence of new material and ideational infrastructures, creating conditions for further adaptations and innovations. These are dynamic, and are frequently subjected to various disruptions that contribute to them being either fully or partially built, unbuilt, dismantled or destroyed. Thus, they reflect ongoing societal needs, embedded in existing layers and chains of other infrastructure, these are rarely fully abandoned, concurrently undergoing transformative processes that build and unbuild their manifest procession and expression. Hall’s “cultural extensions” framework in Beyond Culture can be applied to examine widespread infrastructural change, including disruption, creation, maintenance and rebuilding. Hall posits that everything beyond an individual’s innate biological presence and capabilities is a cultural extension that enables new capabilities. These extensions, ranging from basic tools to complex systems based on chains of cultural extensions, have material outcomes that motivate further extensions. These cultural extensions also have ideational outcomes. Hall observes that people often substitute manifestations of extensions for the outcomes these facilitate, leading to misjudgements about causality. Extensions lead to unforeseen systemic disruptions when arbitrarily invoked. For example, if tariffs, extensions within a system of exchange incentives, are linked directly to a specific outcome of regulating markets outside the context intended for tariffs, disruptions will follow. This paper explores how Hall’s concept of cultural extensions can help understand the dynamic relationship between the built and unbuilt infrastructure as expressed through societal needs, the consequences of conceptualising extensions as outcomes, and how these impact the stability and evolution of infrastructure systems.
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References
Aguirre-Fernández, G., C. Barbieri, S. C. Jett, et al. 2025. A global database on blowguns with links to geography and language. Evolutionary Human Sciences 7, e26 (available on-line: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2513843X25100054/type/journal_article, accessed 23 September 2025).
Buskell, A. 2025. Cultural lineages and the ranking problem. Analysis anae056 (available on-line: https://academic.oup.com/analysis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/analys/anae056/8214337, accessed 13 August 2025).
Cao, Y., B. Enke, A. Falk, P. Giuliano & N. Nunn 2021. Herding, Armed Conflict, and a Culture of Honor: Global Evidence. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research (available on-line: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29250.pdf, accessed 26 September 2025).
Collins, M. 2025. Sibling Gender, Inheritance Customs and Educational Attainment. Journal of Human Resources (available on-line: https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2025/08/01/jhr.1023-13197R2, accessed 13 August 2025).
Dirks, R. 2025. The Effects of Hunger, Starvation and Famine on Certain Eating Habits: A Cross-Cultural Study (available on-line: https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=5390908, accessed 26 September 2025).
Genet, A., T. A. Adem & Y. A. Tesfaye 2025. Aspects of local beliefs, spiritual practices and rituals performed along Abay River in Ethiopia. African Identities 1–17 (available on-line: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14725843.2025.2537207, accessed 13 August 2025).
Harry, K. G., M. De Cespedes Molina, L. Frink, et al. 2025. Exploring Potential Lime Use in Hide Processing on the Shivwits Plateau: An Archaeological, Experimental, and Microbiological Approach. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 32, 50 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-025-09711-x, accessed 18 August 2025).
Ingram, S. E. 2025. Climate and Human Behavior Studies for Our Warming World: An Introduction to the Models, Methods, and Data. Advances in Archaeological Practice 1–18 (available on-line: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S232637682400041X/type/journal_article, accessed 13 August 2025).
Liu, C. 2025. Homo faber in the making: Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of human toolmaking skill acquisition. Emory University (available on-line: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/p8418p807?locale=pt-BR, accessed ).
Ninkova, V., J. Hays, N. Lavi, et al. 2025. Hunter-Gatherer Children at School: A View From the Global South. Review of Educational Research 95, 661–700 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543241255614, accessed 18 August 2025).
Purzycki, B. G. 2025. Morality and the Gods. Elements in the Psychology of Religion (available on-line: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/morality-and-the-gods/B8BF0E8ECE1EF915F9560F8A459123D5, accessed 9 June 2025).
Weiss-Krejci, E. 2025. Fabrics and Funerals: An Ethnographic Enquiry. In Funerary Textiles in Situ (eds) E. Yvanez & M. M. Wozniak, 53–76. (Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland (available on-line: https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-031-69461-5_3, accessed 13 August 2025).
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