David Sandeford
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Mail code: 2402Campus: Tempe
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Student Information
Graduate StudentAnthropology
The College of Lib Arts & Sci
Human societies range from small-scale foraging groups to large-scale agricultural polities and vary enormously over every dimension that we have measured. Yet, this variation is highly systematic over vast ranges of human history and geography. What are the fundamental processes and mechanisms that generate this systematic variation? I use concepts and methods from human macroecology, settlement scaling theory, cultural macroevolution, and other complex systems approaches to human societies to answer these question and others by analyzing large-scale quantitative ethnographic, archaeological, and historical data sets. My career objective is to develop a theoretical framework that can explain the origins and variation of a wide range of interesting social processes and properties ranging from patterns in energy use to territory, population density, the size of cities, the division of labor, the lifespan of societies, levels of cultural complexity, and more.
MA, Columbia University
MA, University of Chicago
BA, University of Texas at Austin
Publications
Sandeford, DS, Turchin, P, Hamilton, MJ, Lobo, J. 2025. Structural and functional constraints predict the scaling of social complexity. Submitted. Runner up for the 2023 Reynold Ruppe Prize for best paper in archaeology by a graduate student in SHESC.
Sandeford DS. 2024. The complex social network structure of large-scale human societies. Submitted to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ezdrj
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)