How to measure ritual attendance accurately?
Together with colleagues from Otago, Martin Lang published an article on the accuracy of methods for measuring ritual attendance in the PLoS ONE journal.
Missing gods or data?
Using open data and code of the recent article published by Whitehouse et al. (2019) in Nature, Beheim et al. argue that the detection of beliefs in moralizing gods is crucially dependent on the presence of writing in past societies.
However, assuming the absence of such beliefs pre-writing is at odds with the ethnographic record that documents such beliefs in non-literate societies. Therefore, the sole reliance on writing may bias our conclusions about such beliefs in past societies as well as the related inference on the causal role of these beliefs in increasing societal complexity.
You can find the article here:
