The first ten volumes of the journal Ethnology included installments of a feature called the "Ethnographic Atlas" in which information was presented in coded form on various of the world's cultures. In 1967, after 862 cultures had been thus coded, they were assembled and published in book form (Murdock 1967) by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The installments in Ethnology continued until 1971, when the total number of cultures coded had reached 1,264. The purpose of the present volume is to present a selected sample of this coded material in a form designed to be maximally useful to scholars in the behavioral sciences. [from the Introduction]