Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater: New Insights into Palaeodemographic Change with the Intensification of Agriculture in Southeast Asia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With the accumulation of bioarchaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia we are beginning to assess the impact that agricultural intensification and associated environmental and social changes had on these societies. Recent work is starting to build up a model of demographic change with increasing population size, and an increase in infectious disease and systemic stress during the late prehistoric period, the so-called Iron Age, largely based on archaeological work in Northeast Thailand. This paper presents a palaeodemographic analysis from this region using several sites that span from the early Neolithic to the late Iron Age (3,800-1,200BP), comprising over 1,000 individuals. We find a statistically significant increase in infants and young children represented in the Iron Age, an age group often ignored in palaeodemographic statistics. These results indicate a palaeodemographic shift with an increase in mortality and/or fertility. At the same time, we also see evidence for major environmental changes, including larger settlements, modification of waterways and social and economic changes indicating the intensification of wet-rice agriculture, and development of hierarchical social organisation. We present a multi-factorial model, considering the bioarchaeological information within the context of environmental change using archaeological, palaeobotanical, geoarchaeological, and epidemiological evidence to characterise this significant biosocial transition.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24448