Cultural Heritage – Overview
In this section, the term „cultural heritage“ has a different meaning from UNESCO‘s Cultural Heritage . Here, the term refers to the economic, political and social organization of local societies around 1900.
On Methodology (in German) (PDF, 91 KB)
It is a structural definition of culture, complementary to, and interlinked with, ideational aspects of social life.
The box on the right links up to different aspects of the cultural heritage. Each one centers around a thematic map:
- The prefix „Type“ refers to maps taken from the Atlas of Pre-Colonial Societies (in German), quoted as ATLAS.
- The prefix „Dim“ refers to maps displaying quantitative dimensions of the social structure, i.e., aggregated indices of ranked variables.
The name and population size (1960) of any local cultural unit can be identified with the help of the respective identification map of the area.
Example in German (PDF, 168 KB)
The maps can be downloaded and printed; besides, they can be purchased in printed form, together with the databank (order).
The three lists below include all the thematic maps discussed under the menu Cultural Heritage. For discussion, click on the links in the right box.
| Point Maps | Country Maps | Maps of Cultural Types |
| Agrotechnical Level (ATE) | Agrotechnical Level (ATE) Nomadic Herding Transfer of Status and Land |
Type of Subsistence Economy Type of Political System Mode of Marriage |
| Socio-Political Differentiation(SPD) | Sexual Division of Labor 1 Sexual Division of Labor 2 Lineality of Kinship Rules |
Type of Family Kinship System 1 Kinship System 2 |
| Sexual Division of Labor | Patridominance Linguistic Homogeneity Religious Homogeneity |
Transfer of Status and Land Language Families |
More about the Methodology (in German):