The principal investigatorwas Frederic L. Pryor.
(from Joun Hartung, Department of Anthrology, Harvard University:)
The data were collected to facilitate the study of the conditions within societies which have led the employment of different types of distributional mechanisms and institutions. All different types of exchange and transfers of goods and services, both within and between precapitalist economies are examined, using a worldwide sample of 60 primitive and peasant societies.
Variables include: society code; geographic location; hardness of environment; contact with the West; mode of subsistence production; percentage of food produced by women; relative work performed by spouses; population of society; population density; land scarcity index; open resources index; land fallowing period; settlement pattern; capital intensiveness; production unit; consumption unit; type of family; level of economic development; domestic market exchange of food; domestic trade percentage of total production of goods; ditto external trade; presence of marketplace; categories of labour outside of the home; interest on loans; land sales; pseudorents; land rent; commercial and noncommercial money; exchange spheres; reciprocal exchange of food, nonfood items, labour; slavery; nonconcentric transfers of goods, labour; gambling; centric transfers of goods, labour; orientation of economic system; postmarital residence; lineages; socioeconomic, political inequality; family potestality; polygyny; divorce rate; bride price; female dower; child-rearing practices; senilicide.
The codebook for this dataset is available through the UBC Library catalogue, with call number GN448 .P782 1977.