Tag Archives: eHRAF Archaeology

The Power and Potential of eHRAF: Cross-Cultural Research and Archaeology

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…

HRAF Announces Community College Initiative

The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University is pleased to announce a new initiative to expand our engagement with community colleges. The HRAF Community College Initiative recognizes the important role of community colleges…

Shaman Lords, Spider Diviners, and Hoards: An Archaeology of the Objects We Bury

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…

Featured Culture: Aztecs, cosmology, and ancient rituals in eHRAF

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 –…

Burning questions: evidence for off-site fire use by hunter-gatherers in eHRAF Archaeology

An insightful publication by Fulco Scherjon, Corrie Bakels, Katharine MacDonald, and Wil Roebroeks in the June 2015 issue of Current Anthropology sheds new light on present-day and historical fire setting practices among hunter-gatherers and foragers.…

Subsistence Types in eHRAF for Teaching & Researching

Faculty and researchers who are teaching courses or doing research on subsistence types may be interested in using HRAF’s cross-cultural databases, eHRAF World Cultures & eHRAF Archaeology. The eHRAF databases uniquely facilitate comparisons of cultures by subsistence,…

eHRAF databases rated “highly recommended” by Choice magazine

Full-text reviews: eHRAF World Cultures; eHRAF Archaeology. HRAF’s cross-cultural databases – eHRAF Archaeology and eHRAF World Cultures – have each been reviewed as “highly recommended” for undergraduates, researchers, faculty and professionals/practitioners in the October 2015…

HRAF at the Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS) in Vienna

Earlier this month (September 7-11, 2015), the Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS XI) convened in Vienna, Austria. The conference was a joint effort of four major anthropological institutions in Vienna: the World…