Demographic Modeling Using the Mortuary Record

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.

Human remains are the most direct line of archaeological evidence of people in the past. The mortuary record, however, is the product of the complex interplay between social practices and taphonomic processes. To understand its formation and consequences for understanding the past, archaeologists have developed a rich methodological and theoretical toolkit. Demographic modeling techniques provide one such suite of tools that can inform our understanding about the sizes of communities that came together to bury their dead. I highlight the utility of demographic modeling using the mortuary record with a case study from Bronze Age Transylvania. The European Bronze Age was a period of social, economic, and ideological transformation. Archaeological explanations of how transformative change occurred within the Bronze Age often invoke shifts in population size and density, including issues of migration, political centralization, and the first emergence of large towns. I develop demographic models for Bronze Age Transylvania that take into account the tempo of burial, restrictiveness of burial rites, and the quantity of individuals interred. Mortuary data, in contexts where they are available and can be engaged ethically, provide a complementary line of evidence that can be compared with other estimates of population size from residential data.

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): 36933.0