DEMOGRAPHY IN ARCHAEOLOGY

Libro de Chamberlain (2006)

1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 The principal concerns of demography
1.1.1 What is a population?
1.1.2 Population characteristics
1.1.3 Demographic data: from individual life histories to population parameters
1.2 Demography in archaeology
1.2.1 Archaeology and people
1.2.2 Population pressure: cause or effect?
1.2.3 Population structure
1.2.4 Health and disease
1.2.5 Migration
1.3 Sources of evidence
1.3.1 Theoretical models
1.3.2 Ethnographic and historical evidence
1.3.3 Archaeological evidence: skeletal remains, settlements and site catchments
1.3.4 Genetic and evolutionary evidence
1.3.5 Evidence from disease

2 DEMOGRAPHIC CONCEPTS , THEORY AND METHODS
2.1 Population structure
2.1.1 Age categories and age distributions
2.1.2 Sex distributions
2.1.3 Other structuring categories
2.2 Population growth and demographic transition
2.2.1 Geometric and exponential growth
2.2.2 Logistic growth
2.2.3 Demographic transition
2.3 Mortality, survivorship and life tables
2.3.1 Mortality
2.3.2 Survivorship
2.3.3 Stable populations
2.3.4 The life table
2.3.5 Hazard functions for modelling mortality and survivorship
2.4 Fertility and population projection
2.4.1 Fertility
2.4.2 Population projection
2.5 Migration and colonisation
2.5.1 Migration
2.5.2 Colonisation
2.6 Population standardisation and comparison
2.6.1 Population standardisation
2.6.2 Population comparison

3 HISTORICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC DEMOGRAPHY
3.1 Documentary sources of demographic data
3.1.1 Vital registration
3.1.2 Censuses
3.1.3 Commemorative inscriptions
3.1.4 Other written sources
3.2 Families and households
3.2.1 Family units
3.2.2 Family reconstitution
3.2.3 Household size
3.3 Longevity, menarche and menopause
3.3.1 Perceptions and misperceptions of longevity
3.3.2 Menarche and menopause
3.4 Historical evidence of migration and colonisation
3.4.1 Migration in pre-industrial Europe
3.4.2 Mass migration and colonisation in the modern era
3.5 Hunter-gatherer demography
3.5.1 Population structure in hunter-gatherers
3.5.2 Mortality and fertility in hunter-gatherers
3.6 Demography of agricultural populations
3.6.1 Population structure in agricultural populations
3.6.2 Mortality and fertility in agricultural populations
3.7 Conditions of high mortality
3.7.1 Crisis mortality and natural disasters
3.7.2 Famine
3.7.3 Epidemic disease
3.7.4 Conflict mortality

4 ARCHAEOLOGICAL DEMOGRAPHY
4.1 Past population structure
4.1.1 Background to the palaeodemography debate
4.1.2 The challenge by Bocquet-Appel and Masset
4.1.3 Uniformitarian assumptions in palaeodemography
4.1.4 Bias in samples and in estimation
4.2 Estimation of sex
4.2.1 Human sex differences
4.2.2 Morphological sex differences in pre-adolescent skeletons
4.2.3 Morphological sex differences in adult skeletons
4.2.4 Accuracy of sex estimation
4.2.5 Biomolecular methods of sex estimation
4.3 Estimation of age at death
4.3.1 Human skeletal development and ageing
4.3.2 Age estimation in fetuses and children
4.3.3 Age estimation in adults: macroscopic methods
4.3.4 Age estimation in adults: microscopic methods
4.4 Bayesian and maximum likelihood approaches to age estimation
4.4.1 General principles in estimating age from morphological indicators
4.4.2 Bayes’ theorem and its application to age estimation
4.4.3 Evaluative studies of Bayesian methods in age estimation
4.4.4 Alternative ways of modelling likelihoods: transition analysis and latent traits
4.4.5 Perinatal age estimation from long bone length
4.4.6 Age estimation and catastrophic mortality profiles
4.4.7 Prospects for the future
4.5 Estimation of population numbers from archaeological data
4.5.1 House sizes and floor areas
4.5.2 Settlement sizes
4.5.3 Site catchments and resource utilisation
4.5.4 Monitoring population size from radiocarbon dating distributions

5 EVOLUTIONARY AND GENETIC PALAEODEMOGRAPHY
5.1 Age and sex structure in animal populations
5.1.1 Natural animal populations
5.1.2 Demography of non-human primates
5.2 Demography of fossil hominids
5.2.1 Maturation times and longevity in fossil hominids
5.2.2 Demography of Australopithecus and early Homo
5.2.3 Demography of Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis
5.3 Human genetic palaeodemography
5.3.1 Genetic studies of present-day populations
5.3.2 Genetic studies of ancient populations

6 DEMOGRAPHY AND DISEASE
6.1 Disease in archaeological populations
6.1.1 Concepts and evidence of disease
6.1.2 Infectious and epidemic diseases
6.1.3 Metabolic, nutritional and deficiency diseases
6.1.4 Neoplastic and congenital diseases
6.1.5 Trauma and homicide
6.2 Social and demographic impacts of disease
6.2.1 Demographic responses to disease
6.2.2 Social responses to disease

7 CONCLUDING REMARKS
7.1 The relevance of demography for archaeology
7.2 How meaningful are the results of palaeodemographic analysis?
7.3 How different were populations in the past?
7.4 Demographic processes and cultural change
7.5 Challenges for the future