Proxies for the Agricultural Demographic Transition: How Well Do Radiocarbon Time-Series Track Crude Birth Rates?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Following the adoption of agriculture, societies frequently experience several hundred years of dramatic intrinsic population growth, followed by a population stabilization or decline; together these patterns are called the Agricultural Demographic Transition (ADT). These patterns result from increased birth rates, which can be tracked through Crude Birth Rates (CBRs), followed by increased mortality rates. However, estimating CBRs from sets of human remains requires huge amounts of individual-level data, which are rare in archaeology given preservation issues and ethical concerns. Radiocarbon data is the most spatially ubiquitous archaeological data across the world. Downey and colleagues (2014) compared summed radiocarbon probabilities (SPDs) to juvenility indices in Europe to find a significant correlation between long-term population trends and radiocarbon SPDs. We return to the European ADT with updated radiocarbon data (Bird et al. 2022) and slightly different methods. Then, we expand this analysis to two regions with well-characterized CBR patterns, the US Southwest (Kohler and Reese 2014), and the US Midwest (Milner and Boldsen 2023). This analysis will aid arguments for the ethical treatment of human remains in areas with a long history of colonialism (Thomas and Krupa 2021) and generate a more well-informed understanding of the radiocarbon dates-as-data approaches for the ADT.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38103.0