How Many People Occupied 25BD1 at AD 1300

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.

The Lynch site (25BD1) is an 80 ha thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Plains Village site on Ponca Creek in northeastern Nebraska occupied by ancestors of the modern Pawnee and Arikara nations. Radiocarbon dates on material from past and recent excavations across the site indicate that settled maize farmers occupied the entire site at AD 1300. We present a range of estimates of the number of people who lived at 25BD1 at its maximum extent based on excavation data, extensive geophysical prospecting, and comparisons of house densities and sizes in horticultural sites on the central and northern Plains. These range widely but indicate that the smallest population likely to have lived there far exceeded the occupation of the town at any point post colonization by Europeans.

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

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37120.0