Mardi Gras has become synonymous with the culture and lifestyle of New Orleans and southern Louisiana. “Fat Tuesday” or mardi gras in French, is the name given to the feast day that marks the onset…
The New Year is underway, which means it’s time for our annual news and notes review. This post will summarize our highlights from the previous year as well as what you can expect to see…
Jeffrey Vadala Given that the archaeological record is often incomplete, how can archaeologists make reliable conclusions about human behavior in the past? Archaeologists employ a variety of approaches to this end, using statistical, interpretive, comparative…
Jeffrey Vadala Throughout history, humans have collected and buried groups of objects together, whether for ritual purposes (e.g., offerings to the gods) or pragmatic reasons (e.g., for secret stores of food). Today, many cultural groups…
Have you ever wondered how the Human Relations Area Files got its name? Or how we organized our ethnographic collections for members before the Internet? HRAF has partnered with Choice’s podcast The Authority File to…
Did you know that as a small, non-profit organization, Human Relations Area Files services over 500 academic member institutions from around the world? Anthropologists, archaeologists, social scientists, and cross-cultural researchers from these institutions benefit from…
This week’s featured eHRAF teaching exercise was produced in-house here at HRAF by Christiane Cunnar. Designed for classroom use or as a homework assignment, Exercise 2.3 Burial Practices: A world-wide comparison of burial practices in…
The Aztec Empire constituted the greatest empire in Mesoamerican prehistory, both territorially and demographically, extending from highland basins to coastal plains, valleys and lowland forests. The Mexica – as the Aztec people are known –…
If you haven’t yet browsed our open access collection of over 40 teaching exercises, now is a perfect time. Teaching eHRAF is a ready-made classroom companion offering sample syllabi for the eHRAF World Cultures and…
What is a “normal” childhood? Childhood, child-rearing and care-giving are all areas of human development which are largely taken for granted from within a single culture. However, approaches to childhood and children vary greatly across…