Cross the streams. multiproxy approaches to demography and population dynamics

2018

In the last decades, approaches dealing with demographic assessments based on archaeological data have experienced enormous popularity. One reason for this is certainly that almost all aspects of past societies, which are archaeologically interesting, are re- lated to the question of the size of these societies. A variety of different methods have developed in this course. These include the number of sites per time period and relative site density, size of sites, density of artefacts, 14C data, paleoanthropological or paleo- botanical methods as well as oral and written history. While most investigations rely on only one of the methods, linking of different proxies is the only way to check …