What can lithics tell us about demography: people are not rocks (nor dates)

Abstract

Lithic technology coevolves with economic systems of supply and processing, mobility and land use strategies, social learning, and public signaling. In turn, that package of cultural practices co-evolves with population size and ecosystem operation. Hence, lithic technology is indirectly and variably associated with population size. Lithic artifacts have been used as a proxy for population size, but we argue those coevolutionary interactions do not produce fixed relationships between numbers of people and the number of lithic artifacts (or dates) produced. This conclusion leads us to be critical of the kinds of demographic proxies commonly being used in archaeology.