No abstract
The Murdock-White sampling alignment, prepared for their Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, is the procedure of choice for solving Galton's problem, in place of any of Naroll's alignments. In order to use the Mur dock-White alignment for societies other than the 186 in their sample, it is necessary to take advantage of the Loftin-Hill concordance, which cov ers the 862 societies of the 1967 Ethnographic Atlas. However, Loftin and Hill's original concordance is ambiguous with respect to the placement of 32 societies, including such well-known ones as the Rwala, the Sanussi, the French, the Hupa, the Yurok, and the Karok. Loftin and Hill also did not classify the Tzeltal or any of the dozens of Overseas European soci eties. This paper claims to resolve these difficulties and thus to make the full 1967 Ethnographic Atlas list available for the Murdock-White align ment procedure. A revised concordance is presented as an appendix.
In a recent paper, Bowden (1972) argues that the best overall measure of societal complexity or cultural evolution is maximum settlement size. By maximum settlement size is meant the number of people in the largest settlement in the society or ethnic unit. This variable can be operationally defined as the largest cluster of people occurring during the annual cycle-a cluster in turn can be defined as a group of people who sleep on a given night within ten kilometers of a single central point. While census data of course are not commonly collected with this operational definition in mind, they commonly can be applied to the kinds of census reports which in fact occur.Four studies to date have compiled data on maximum settlement size. Two of them (Tatje and Naroll 1970; Naroll and Divale n.d.) use the same definition of maximum settlement size we use here. A third ( Naroll 1956) uses a definition which differs slightly: DEFINITION 1.0. Settlement size. The number of people in the most populous building cluster of the ethnic unit studied. That number is the raw score of the urbanization indicator. DEFINITION 1.1. Building cluster. All those buildings which can be successively interconnected by an imaginary line no more than two hundred meters from one building to the next. In other words, a group of buildings no one of which is more than two hundred meters from some other one in the group.The two hundred meter distance is arbitrary; furthermore, precise measurements are often
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