Density Dependent Models Rely on Accurate Population Estimates

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists increasingly leverage ideal distribution models to analyze settlement and demographic patterning in the past. Successful application requires adequate, spatially explicit proxies of both environmental suitability and past population. This paper focuses on the latter, recognizing that a growing number of studies rely on summaries of assemblages of radiocarbon dates as proxies for past population. However, this “dates as data” approach has known—though often ignored—sources of bias that may impact interpretations of settlement behavior, leading to spurious conclusions. Here we examine the impact of landscape taphonomic bias on the interpretation of past settlement and population density within an ideal distribution framework through a case study of the Bonneville Basin of western North America. The results (a) suggest the scale of potential effects of incautious use of dates as data and (b) provide some clear ways to improve demographic estimates and provide more reliable analyses of past behavior in its ecological context.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37419.0