Session: #627

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

In the last two decades, approaches dealing with demographic assessments based on archaeological data have experienced enormous popularity. The reason for this is certainly that almost all aspects of past societies, which are archaeologically interesting, is related to the question of the size of these societies. A certain zoo of different methods has developed in this course. These include the number of sites per time period and relative site density, size sites, density of artefacts, 14C data, paleoanthropological or paleobotanical methods as well as oral and written history, to mention a few.

However, it is obvious that most investigations rely on only one of these methods. The linking of different proxies is the only way to check their validity and to calibrate them because of the lack of ground truth.

For this session we would like to invite contributions that examine archaeological case studies regarding demography and population dynamics using more than one method or proxy. What knowledge can be gained from combining different methods? Which approaches have proven their worth, and which ones confirm each other? Have we developed methods of correlating the individual proxies with each other that go beyond observing correlation or forming mean values? How can we correlate proxies with different temporal resolution? We welcome studies based on empirical evidence and archaeological data as well as papers dealing with these issues from a theoretical perspective.

Demography, multi-proxy, population dynamics

no

no

no

Steinar Solheim (Norway) ¹

Dr. Martin Hinz (Germany) ²
Dr. Agustín Diez Castillo (Spain) ³