D-PLACE / Seshat

D-PLACE, the Ethnographic Atlas, and the Seshat databank are cross-cultural comparative datasets. Rather than describing one society in depth, they code hundreds or thousands of societies worldwide on the same standardized variables -- political scale, kinship rules, subsistence style -- so patterns can be tested across cultures rather than within just one.

Because these datasets are built for comparison across many societies at once, they are the natural instrument for conjectures that claim a pattern is general rather than local to one culture. Heredity is scale's default; the throne was the distraction and Kingship is scale's default both test whether political succession defaults to a particular logic -- inherited rank, kingship itself -- as the ordinary baseline across societies of a given scale, rather than as a special institution requiring its own explanation.