CROSSDEM’18 : Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Prehistoric Demography  

Congrès, colloques, réunions

 

1er et 2 mars 2018
Tarragone - IPHES

Call for Contributions

 

Prehistorians have had a long interest in the study of demography and associated processes. Scholars are not only interested in identifying such events in the archaeological record but in trying to locate their root cause, whether climatic, environmental, technological or cultural/social. However, no element of the archaeological record is directly associated with demographic factors such as population sizes, growth or fertility rates – these, therefore, must be inferred from the available data. This is often done through statistical analyses of different proxies, often number of archaeological sites, artefact densities, radiocarbon dates, palaeoanthropological data such as cemetery age profiles, or DNA. Many such studies have successfully reconstructed important demographic factors, such as growth, fertility, mortality and dispersal rates for prehistoric societies. Other studies have identified significant population growths, crashes and bottlenecks.

 

However, few studies have looked at different proxies for the same period and region, leaving open broader methodological issues such as whether some proxies are more sensitive than others to particular demographic processes or factors and what the impact of the scale of analysis on results is.
 

This workshop aims to create a space for scholars who have been considering prehistoric demography using differing, but complementary, datasets and approaches, with a view towards discussing issues raised by multi-proxy analysis, cross-disciplinarity, as well as any differences between hunter-gatherer and farmer societies’ population histories. We invite contributions that address these issues from either purely theoretical/methodological perspectives or through case studies. We aim to publish select contributions as a special issue of an international peer reviewed journal and, therefore, we will only accept contributions that are original, unpublished and that commit to submitting a paper for publication.
Abstracts should be 500 words max, plus references, and explicitly mention the materials and methods used. Deadline for abstract sumission is January 26th 2018. Abstracts should be submitted from the website (see link above). We aim to publish select contributions as a special issue of an international peer reviewed journal and, therefore, we will only accept contributions that are original, unpublished and that commit to submitting a paper for publication by the proposed deadline.

 

Plus d'infos
 

Submission deadline : January 26th 2018