David Sandeford
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Mail code: 2402Campus: Tempe
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Student Information
Graduate StudentAnthropology
The College of Lib Arts & Sci
I research the structure, function, and evolution of human societies. Human societies range from small-scale foraging groups of 10s to large-scale agricultural polities of 100s of millions and vary enormously over as many dimensions as have been measured. Yet this variation is highly systematic over time and across cultures. Are there fundamental principles and processes explain this systematic variation? My research attempts to answer this question by using ethnographic, archaeological, and historical data sets to uncover how patterns in energy creation and consumption interact with the structure and functioning of human societies to produce predictable regularities in territory, density, city size, the division of labor, the lifespan of civilizations, and overall levels of cultural complexity.
MA, Columbia University
MA, University of Chicago
BA, University of Texas at Austin
Publications
Sandeford, DS, Turchin, P, Hamilton, MJ, Lobo, J. n.d. The functional origins and scaling of human cultural complexity. Runner up for the 2021 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Sandeford, DS. 2021. A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethographic record. Nature Human Behaviour 5:1502-1509. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01120-w. Runner up for the 2020 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Hamilton, M, Walker, RS, Buchanan B, and Sandeford, DS. 2020. Scaling human sociopolitical complexity. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0234615. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234615.
Sandeford, DS. 2018. Organizational complexity and demographic scale in primary states. Royal Society Open Science 5:171137. http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/5/171137. Awarded the 2019 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Sandeford, DS. n.d. Chomsky versus Habermas on human nature and political evolution. Master's thesis, University of Chicago.
See biography for details.
See biography.
"The task of social anthropology, as a natural science of human society, is the systematic investigation of the nature of social institutions. The method of natural science rests always on the comparison of observed phenomena, and the aim of such comparison is by a careful examination of diversities to discover underlying uniformities. Applied to human societies the comparative method used as an instrument for inductive inference will enable us to discover the universal, essential, characters which belong to all human societies, past, present, and future. The progressive achievement of knowledge of this kind must be the aim of all who believe that a veritable science of human society is possible and desirable." -- A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (p. xi in Fortes and Evans-Pritchard's African Political Systems, 1940)
Courses taught at various community colleges: introduction to sociology (the structure and function of human societies); introduction to archaeological anthropology (the evolution of human societies)