Daniel Hoyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1096767 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Hoyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Hoyer |
| SIGNATURE | HOYER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Brown College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2675-257X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Polaris2025 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical dataset named Polaris2025, a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data. This dataset focuses on a well curated list of polities and variables that have been already used in publications or will be used in forthcoming ones. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Polaris2025 dataset. The Polaris2025 dataset b…
CRISES Averted. How A Few Past Societies Found Adaptive Reforms in the Face of Structural-Demographic Crises
Historians and social scientists have long been preoccupied with understanding and documenting periods of crisis. Such emphasis is only growing, and becoming more pressing, as the world continues to face a number of interrelated stressors in the form of irreversible climate change, major ecological shocks and disease outbreaks, eruptions of military violence, economic disruptions and deepening inequalities, political polarization and unrest, the …
All Crises are Unhappy in Their Own Way: The Role of Societal Instability in Shaping the Past
Societal “crises” are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consi…
Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward: A Response to Critics
In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, whil…
Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Big Gods and big science: Further reflections on theory, data, and analysis
Our target article empirically tested the Big Gods Hypothesis which proposes that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment (MSP) contributed to the evolution of socio-political complexity (SPC) in world history. We tested this hypothesis using a suite of measures of MSP, SPC, and other potential evolutionary drivers coded in Seshat: Global History Databank. Our analyses indicate that intensity of warfare and productivity of agriculture were …
Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: A review and “retake”
This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deities drove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history. The Letter was retracted by the authors in response to a critique by Beheim et al. (2021). Correction of errors in the coding and analysis of missing data to addre…
Introduction to Special Issue: Leading Scholars of the Past Comment on Dawn of Everything
Critical Reception
Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium Part 9: Empathy
Auckland Face Simulator and Witness are two transdisciplinary projects collaboratively developed with Mark Sagar at the Laboratory for Animate Technologies, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.Corballis has utilized the digital agent modeling constructed by Sagar in a cognitive neuropsychological research project titled the Auckland Face Simulator (AFS) project. AFS is an investigation led by Corballis an…
An integrative approach to estimating productivity in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank
This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines th…
An Introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank
This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about t…
The Equinox2020 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical time-series dataset named “Equinox2020,” a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data for a well-curated list of polities and variables available on the Seshat Data Browser. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Equinox2020 dataset
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE
The Roman Empire has long held pride of place in the collective memory of scholars, politicians, and the general public in the western world. In Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE, Daniel Hoyer offers a new approach to explain Rome's remarkable development. Hoyer surveys a broad selection of material to see how this diverse body of evidence can be reconciled to produce a single, coherent picture of the Roman e…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Regionalism in Rome’s Third Century Fiscal Crisis. A statistical approach to ancient economic history
Hoyer Daniel. Regionalism in Rome’s Third Century Fiscal Crisis. A statistical approach to ancient economic history. In: Topoi, volume 21/1, 2017. pp. 233-262
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
Seshat: The Global History Databank
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Agricultural productivity in past societies: Toward an empirically informed model for testing cultural evolutionary hypotheses
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin (review)
Reviewed by: The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin Daniel Hoyer Peter Temin. The Roman Market Economy. The Princeton Economic History of the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 299. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-14768. The Roman Market Economy offers “a progress report in the process of understanding the nature of ancient economies” (ix), building on Temin’s earlier work in economic history. With the blunt statement th…
Public feasting, elite competition, and the market economy of Roman North Africa
This article explores the economy of Roman North Africa, particularly the province of Africa Proconsularis, in an attempt to illuminate how the area grew to become one of the most prosperous areas of the Roman Empire. Looking specifically at the institutional role played by competitive, ostentatious spending on public goods by elites in the region, I contend that this elite competition and the money this injected into the regional economy was a m…
Samnite Economy and the Competitive Environment of Italy in . the Fifth to Third Centuries bc
It is necessary to rethink our approach to this crucial period in Roman history, and to focus on analyses which not only highlight the rivalry between the Romans and Samnites for political and military dominance, but also account for the competition over access to and control over the material resources and the economic wealth of central-eastern Italy. This chapter reviews some of the archaeological evidence, most of which strongly suggests that …
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Seshat: The Global History Databank
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Agricultural productivity in past societies: Toward an empirically informed model for testing cultural evolutionary hypotheses
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE
The Roman Empire has long held pride of place in the collective memory of scholars, politicians, and the general public in the western world. In Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE, Daniel Hoyer offers a new approach to explain Rome's remarkable development. Hoyer surveys a broad selection of material to see how this diverse body of evidence can be reconciled to produce a single, coherent picture of the Roman e…
Samnite Economy and the Competitive Environment of Italy in . the Fifth to Third Centuries bc
It is necessary to rethink our approach to this crucial period in Roman history, and to focus on analyses which not only highlight the rivalry between the Romans and Samnites for political and military dominance, but also account for the competition over access to and control over the material resources and the economic wealth of central-eastern Italy. This chapter reviews some of the archaeological evidence, most of which strongly suggests that …
The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin (review)
Reviewed by: The Roman Market Economy by Peter Temin Daniel Hoyer Peter Temin. The Roman Market Economy. The Princeton Economic History of the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 299. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-14768. The Roman Market Economy offers “a progress report in the process of understanding the nature of ancient economies” (ix), building on Temin’s earlier work in economic history. With the blunt statement th…
Public feasting, elite competition, and the market economy of Roman North Africa
This article explores the economy of Roman North Africa, particularly the province of Africa Proconsularis, in an attempt to illuminate how the area grew to become one of the most prosperous areas of the Roman Empire. Looking specifically at the institutional role played by competitive, ostentatious spending on public goods by elites in the region, I contend that this elite competition and the money this injected into the regional economy was a m…
Seshat: The Global History Databank
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Agricultural productivity in past societies: Toward an empirically informed model for testing cultural evolutionary hypotheses
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
Regionalism in Rome’s Third Century Fiscal Crisis. A statistical approach to ancient economic history
Hoyer Daniel. Regionalism in Rome’s Third Century Fiscal Crisis. A statistical approach to ancient economic history. In: Topoi, volume 21/1, 2017. pp. 233-262
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE
The Roman Empire has long held pride of place in the collective memory of scholars, politicians, and the general public in the western world. In Money, Culture, and Well-Being in Rome's Economic Development, 0-275 CE, Daniel Hoyer offers a new approach to explain Rome's remarkable development. Hoyer surveys a broad selection of material to see how this diverse body of evidence can be reconciled to produce a single, coherent picture of the Roman e…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
An Introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank
This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about t…
The Equinox2020 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical time-series dataset named “Equinox2020,” a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data for a well-curated list of polities and variables available on the Seshat Data Browser. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Equinox2020 dataset
An integrative approach to estimating productivity in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank
This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines th…
Introduction to Special Issue: Leading Scholars of the Past Comment on Dawn of Everything
Critical Reception
Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium Part 9: Empathy
Auckland Face Simulator and Witness are two transdisciplinary projects collaboratively developed with Mark Sagar at the Laboratory for Animate Technologies, Auckland Bioengineering Institute, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.Corballis has utilized the digital agent modeling constructed by Sagar in a cognitive neuropsychological research project titled the Auckland Face Simulator (AFS) project. AFS is an investigation led by Corballis an…
Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Big Gods and big science: Further reflections on theory, data, and analysis
Our target article empirically tested the Big Gods Hypothesis which proposes that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment (MSP) contributed to the evolution of socio-political complexity (SPC) in world history. We tested this hypothesis using a suite of measures of MSP, SPC, and other potential evolutionary drivers coded in Seshat: Global History Databank. Our analyses indicate that intensity of warfare and productivity of agriculture were …
Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: A review and “retake”
This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deities drove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history. The Letter was retracted by the authors in response to a critique by Beheim et al. (2021). Correction of errors in the coding and analysis of missing data to addre…
Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward: A Response to Critics
In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, whil…
The Polaris2025 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical dataset named Polaris2025, a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data. This dataset focuses on a well curated list of polities and variables that have been already used in publications or will be used in forthcoming ones. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Polaris2025 dataset. The Polaris2025 dataset b…
CRISES Averted. How A Few Past Societies Found Adaptive Reforms in the Face of Structural-Demographic Crises
Historians and social scientists have long been preoccupied with understanding and documenting periods of crisis. Such emphasis is only growing, and becoming more pressing, as the world continues to face a number of interrelated stressors in the form of irreversible climate change, major ecological shocks and disease outbreaks, eruptions of military violence, economic disruptions and deepening inequalities, political polarization and unrest, the …
All Crises are Unhappy in Their Own Way: The Role of Societal Instability in Shaping the Past
Societal “crises” are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consi…
Economics (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (8 works) · History (8 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Data science (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)