A Precontact, Late Prehistoric Decline in the North American Indigenous Population

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Lawrence Todd has long contributed to “big picture” research. Here we discuss one instance of such research using a new radiocarbon database (Kelly et al. 2022, American Antiquity) of >104,000 ages to discuss population trends of North America’s Indigenous population of the past 13,000 years. We focus on the late precontact period and corroborate, with a larger, higher quality dataset, the conclusion of Peros et al. (2010) that the Indigenous population reached a peak at ~AD 1150. We rule out archaeological sampling as the cause of this peak. We then examine spatial trends in the timing of the precontact peak, showing that some areas reached a peak prior to AD 1150 and others not until European contact. We discuss issues involved in accurately characterizing the timing of the precontact peak in different areas and suggest possible causes, all interlinked, of the apparent decline.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36117.0