Eight Million Neolithic Europeans: Social Demography and Social Archaeology on the Scope of Change - from the Near East to Scandinavia

Description

In book: Paradigm Found: Archaeological Theory – Present, Past and Future. Essays in Honour of Evžen Neustupný. — Oxbow Books, 2015. — pp. 200-214.The organization of political institutions, social behaviour and the possibility of joint action is most dependent on the demographic size and development of societies. While ‘demography’ is just as important for social developments as ‘economy’, newly arising theoretical and methodological discourses on social demography and social archaeology have sharpened tools and interpretations for demographic considerations. With this background in mind, some results of archaeological research on demography are presented. For both the Near East and Europe, population calculations (6500–1500 BCE) put forth information on absolute values of population sizes and shifts in demographic development. The potential of the investigation is found in the interlinking of technological, social and demographic changes. For the first time, a combination of Near Eastern and European values is presented. On the one hand, they underline the structural difference between both supra-regions and, on the other hand, they verify demographic shifts and changes dependent in both areas on changes, e.g., in subsistence technologies or social formation processes. Around 6000 BCE, about 1 million humans lived in Europe, whereas around 2000 BCE already nearly 8 million inhabitants lived on the continent. In consequence, a paradigm has changed: Archaeology of the twenty-first century is able to integrate demographic proxies into analyses from local to global scales.