This interdisciplinary workshop brings together researchers from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) to explore how newly available large-scale historical and archaeological databases can transform our understanding of social and cultural evolution. Building on years of collaboration between teams led by Wolpert, Kohler, Turchin, and Kondor, the workshop will integrate data from sources such as Seshat, GINI, ancient Chinese archaeology, agricultural productivity datasets, and studies on cultural production. Together, these datasets now allow empirical testing of long-standing theories about the evolution of human societies.

Key questions include the role of warfare in the rise of complex societies, feedback between social scale and collective cognition, the drivers and consequences of inequality, the impact of agriculture and technology on state formation, and the emergence of transformative cultural ideas such as democracy and moral religions. In addition to addressing these theoretical issues, the workshop will focus on two major methodological challenges: how to link heterogeneous datasets through shared spatio-temporal units, and how to apply robust analytical and statistical methods to test theories of social evolution across scales.

Participation in this workshop is by invitation only.