Claim: Roger Cribb was an applied social scientist who wanted to take over as much ethnographic fieldwork as possible and stored his data in purpose-designated databases.
Evidence: Dr Cribb's life's work is the work of a practical, applied social scientist who firmly believed anthropological models, grounded and parsimoniously applied, could reliably reach beyond our existing accumulated knowledge, into the archaeological past of some of our oldest cultures in some of the more sparsely populated regions of our world: i.e. the nomadic pastoralists of Anatolia (Turkey) and the gatherer-hunters of Cape York, (Australia). Dr Cribb's research practice was to strive to undertake as much 'ethnographic' fieldwork as possible with the peoples whose heritage he wished to later unravel and reveal. His preference was to store his (and other peoples) data within purpose-designed databases, and then apply small, efficient purpose-designed computer programs to analyze the data and distill, reveal, confirm, plus extrapolate social and environmental organising principles and patterns.