Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding the relationships between the scale of population levels, food production, and emerging social inequality has long been a central focus in archaeology and anthropology. Often based on surface distribution of cultural materials, or mortuary analysis, researchers have advanced relatively high population estimates. While there are exceptions, these are often based more on intuition and less on detailed comparative analysis or statistical methods. Be it focused on Woodland mounds of the eastern North America, Pueblos of the American Southwest, or Neolithic villages of the Near East, or a host of other case studies, some of these estimates have become enshrined in archaeological literature and the minds of the general public. In this session presenters reengage with how we reconstruct population levels within a settlement, how we estimate regional population change, and what methods are best employed to estimate how many people lived at a settlement. Beyond thinking about methods for demographic reconstruction, and the extent to which researchers are over estimating past population levels, the presenters in this session will reconsider a range of perspectives on how population growth and pressure may have served as drivers of short-term decision making and long-term evolutionary change.