Artifact Density and Population Density in Bronze Age China

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.

A common method of estimating population is to multiply a settlement area by an occupational density. Empirical studies show that occupational density generally increases with settlement size but estimating occupational density when structural remains are not observable has remained a methodological challenge. Here, we suggest that occupational density is systematically related to the surface artifact density of archaeological sites. We employ settlement scaling theory to derive the expected relationship between artifact density and population density. Then, we analyze data from the Chifeng Region of northern China to show that pottery consumption rates, reflected in measured densities of potsherds, do in fact increase with settlement areas in a way that is consistent with this expectation, leading to improved accuracy and precision in demographic reconstructions.

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): 37300.0