Original dataset for the paper "Cultural macroevolution of musical instruments in South America", written by Gabriel Aguirre-Fernandez, Chiara Barbieri, Anna Graff, José Pérez de Arce A., Hyram Moreno and Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra. Supplementary Table S1: Classification of instruments according to Hornbostel and Sachs (1914), subsequent revisions and new data for South America. Supplementary Table S2: Instrument repertoire based on the work of Izikowitz (1935) on ethnographic data, and information on the societies for which the instrument data is found. For each society, the presence/absence of each music instrument is recorded (57 types of instruments in 144 societies or ethnic groups). Character state 1 marks the definite presence of an instrument in the ethnographic record and 0 marks the lack of evidence for a particular instrument. Supplementary Table S3: Data matrix of panpipe profiles. The dataset includes 13 instrument features subdivided in 53 different character states, annotated for 61 societies or ethnic groups. The folder includes R scripts to elaborate the datasets and generate figures.