Demography and Social Organization of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Populations: An Evolutionary Perspective

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.

This paper addresses the broad issue of population estimates as proxies and drivers of the evolution of social structures taking the example of the Cucuteni-Tripolye cultural complex (CTCC) covering a territory from the Eastern Carpathians to the Dnieper region in modern Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine, 5000–3000/2950 BCE. Settlements of this cultural complex significantly vary in size. The largest of them, the so-called megasites or giant-settlements, reached an area of 100–320 ha. First, we analyze the impact of population estimates on understanding social organization of the CTCC populations. Second, our paper discusses population size and density at different spatial scales as drivers of social changes. Third, the CTCC example is considered in a broader framework of patterns and processes in arising complexity during late 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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37268.0