Religion and ecology: A pilot study employing the database of religious history

Abstract

High gods have been found to be associated with resource stress and climate stability in ethnographic samples. In this research we aimed to replicate these analyses, using data from the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), a large qualitative and quantitative database that encompasses samples from a much larger temporal range than used in previous studies. Using the DRH enables testing the associations between ecology and a much wider variety of religious variables than is possible using other data sources, while also obtaining significant temporal depth. Given the large temporal range of the DRH, we explore the feasibility of using paleoclimate reconstructions to extract ecological variables across time.Of all paleoclimate reconstructions, temperature reconstructions have the highest resolution across time, while precipitation reconstructions have the lowest. Ecological variables from higher resolution reconstructions are likely to be more accurate than those from lower resolution reconstructions. It appears feasible to use temperature reconstructions to simulate historic temperatures of DRH regions. However, when it came to analyzing DRH and ecological variables extracted from paleoclimate reconstructions, we were unable to replicate previous findings. We explore possible reasons for this discrepancy, including inaccurate climate reconstructions, ecological variables being unrepresentative of the standard climate, aggregation method and—perhaps most significantly—the inadequacy of existing statistical tools for dealing with the kind of complex and highly interrelated cultures that have characterized most of human history.

Keywords

• Large-scale cultural databases
• Big data
• Religion
• Ecology
• Cultural evolution
• Culture