Palaeodemography: A New Hope

Abstract

Palaeodemography is the study of the demographic attributes of past populations, including population size, structure, growth, density, fertility, mortality and migration. Such attributes can provide significant and valuable insights into the ability of past humans to adapt in response to environmental events, such as climate change and availability of resources, and societal change, for instance migration, warfare, and social complexity. The impacts of the agricultural transition on fertility and mortality has been of great interest over recent decades, with research to date indicating major changes in health following the adoption and/or intensification of agriculture. Also of significant interest at present are the impacts of past climate change on human populations as indicated by shifts in demographic profiles. Notwithstanding, several key issues underpin palaeodemography, with the predominant concerns at present being the underenumeration of infants, inaccuracy of age-at-death estimation techniques, non-stationarity of populations, and representativeness of archaeological samples. Such concerns present different challenges for research in Asia-Pacific, where preservational conditions and cultural practices differ from those commonly observed in Europe and the Americas. This thesis aims to address the primary issues in palaeodemography, with a focus on developing palaeodemographic tools for use in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to developing a new toolkit for palaeodemography, this project will apply the palaeodemographic estimators and knowledge developed in previous components of this research to bioarchaeological data from Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The results of each analysis will be discussed in the context of archaeological data and relevant palaeodemographic studies and trends from other regions. The first application, to Southeast Asia, is aimed to evaluate the precision of the new methods in a context where a robust archaeological narrative for population growth already exists. In doing so, the methods will be cross-validated with the archaeological evidence. Further, this application should identify whether sample representativeness is problematic in the region and whether it negatively impacts the methods. The application to the Pacific will focus on providing new insights in an area where a patchy archaeological record exists, building off the previous work in Southeast Asia to demonstrate the knowledge that can be gained through these methods. The thesis will conclude by noting the limitations of the methods and issues identified through the application of methods, summarising the research and whether it has addressed the research questions and hypotheses, and providing suggestions for future research.