Institutional complexity emerges from socioecological complexity in small-scale human societies

Human lifestyles vary enormously over time and space and so understanding the origins of this diversity has always been a central focus of anthropology. A major source of this cultural variation is the variation in institutional complexity; the cultural packages of rules, norms, ontologies, and expectations passed down through societies across generations. In this paper we study the emergence of institutions in small-scale societies. There are two primary schools of thought. The first is that institutions emerge top-down as rules are imposed by elites on their societies in order to gain asymmetrical access to power, resources, and influence over others through coercion. The second is that institutions emerge bottom-up to facilitate interactions within populations as they seek collective solutions to adaptive problems. Here, we use Bayesian networks to infer the causal structure of institutional complexity in 172 small-scale societies across ethnohistoric western North America reflecting..., These data were compiled from Jorgensen JG. 1980 Western Indians: Comparative environments, languages, and cultures of 172 Western American Indian tribes. New York: WH freeman and restructured following the Methods outlined in the main paper accompanying this dataset., , # Jorgensen's Western Indians database and R code for running a Bayesian network model

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gb5mkkwz3](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gb5mkkwz3)

These data were compiled from Jorgensen JG. 1980 *Western Indians: Comparative environments, languages, and cultures of 172 Western American Indian tribes*. New York: WH freeman and restructured following the Methods outlined in the main paper accompanying this dataset.

## Variable description

*society_name_dplace    *The name of the society in D-Place

*society_xd_id                    *ID number for each society

*language_glottocode     *The equivalent language name in the glottolog

*language_name               *The name of the langauge

*language_family              *The family of the language

*group                    *The common name of the group

*Lat                          *Latitude

*Long                      *Longitude

*phyla                     *Ordinal variable representing the language phyla

*tech...