Peopling the Paleolithic: Demographic Approaches to Earliest Prehistory

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

With its sparse and often fragmentary human fossil record, comparatively limited range of material culture, and almost total absence of structural evidence, reconstructing local and regional population levels in the Paleolithic is especially difficult. Focusing on the European Paleolithic record, this paper will briefly review the methods at our disposal to reconstruct demography in earliest prehistory and outline best practice for the use of ethnographic data from recent foragers in these reconstructions. Using examples from across the nearly two-million-year span of the European Paleolithic, I highlight areas of uncertainty and divergence in current Paleolithic population estimates, and discuss the implications of these for our understanding of long-term population trajectories and cultural change in early prehistory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37714.0