Demography

In its focus on where people live, settlement system analysis is quintessentially demographic in character. Explicitly or implicitly, most settlement system analysis is based on an assessment of how many people lived where. In some instances, these assessments can be made by counting actual residential structures (e. g., house mounds in the Maya lowlands) or even rooms (as in the pueblos of the US Southwest). More often, when the archaeological evidence on the landscape consists primarily of artifact distributions, quantification is more complicated. Settlement system analysis has relied on the numbers of archaeological sites in different locations, on measurements of areas across which artifact distributions are spread, or on measurements of such areas qualified by measurements of the densities of those artifact distributions. The fundamental assumption at the core of such demographic analyses is that, other things being equal, larger numbers of people leave larger quantities of debris on a landscape, and that at least some constituents of this debris are preserved as archaeological remains in the vicinity of the locations where that debris was produced. Other things that must be equal (or that steps may need to be taken to equalize) include patterns of use of easily preserved artifacts such as ceramics, length of chronological periods, and permanence of residence patterns.