The Study of Infectious Disease in human populations has traditionally focused on the biological factors of virulence of the pathogen and the immunity of the host. Since this type of research has been stimulated by the need for the development of treatments for specific diseases, it is not difficult to understand this orientation. The definition of symptoms, differential diagnosis and the isolation of the pathogen are essential elements in the eventual treatment of a disease. The clinical approach to the study of disease was necessarily particularistic. Although population parameters were considered in evaluating the incidence of a disease, the social and cultural factors were seldom dealt with fully. Alland's (1970) study is one of the best attempts to examine the interaction of disease and population in the perspective of adaptation.

In this paper, we will review studies which demonstrate the importance of culture in the transmission of infectious diseases, and from this perspective, we will attempt to develop an evolutionary framework for studying disease in human populations. Specifically, we will examine the effect of infectious diseases in small populations and propose models which will allow the measurement of these effects.

The practical problems involved in measuring and using “carrying capacity” have proven the concept to be deficient in theory, unrealistic in implementation, and impossible to measure. The concept should be abandoned or modified. It is suggested that the actual rates of morbidity and mortality due to resource deficiency and starvation are easier to measure and more accurately reflect the types of information which “carrying capacity” was meant to encompass. These measures can also accommodate the cyclical nature of resource availability which has rendered carrying capacity useless as a working concept. Emphasis is placed on “efficiency” of population maintenance at given levels.

Locational Analysis has been a fundamental part of research in plant ecology and cultural geography for many years (for reviews see Greig-Smith 1964; Haggett 1966; Harvey 1967; King 1969; Morrill 1970). Recently there has been a growing interest in applying locational analysis in anthropological studies (for example, Plog 1968; Zubrow 1970; Wood 1971; Johnson 1972; Marcus 1973; Whallon 1973a, 1973b; Waddell 1972). The spatial organization of settlements and smaller units of human activity is relevant to an understanding of population structure. The distribution of human activity areas is presumably the result of complex interrelationships between social, biological, and ecological variables, and therefore should provide significant information regarding the effects of these variables in given situations. This paper will compare the historic pattern of community growth in Hampshire and Franklin Counties, Massachusetts, with that predicted by Hudson's (1969) model of rural settlement location.

The topography of the study area (Fig. 1) is dominated by the presence of the Connecticut River Valley and its tributaries. This region was first settled by Europeans in the 1650s and was primarily agricultural until recent times. The area has been characterized by rapid population growth over much of its history, and the population has tended to be distributed in the form of towns and small villages. The time period considered in the present study will be 1650-1850 which represents the time of maximum dispersal of settlements, prior to the advent of the automobile and most railroad traffic.

More Than 20 Years Ago (1953) research was published on the relationship between mean annual rainfall and the size of the domain occupied by Australian Aboriginal tribal groups. When the original series of 409 tribes was refined to a more homogeneous basic series of 123 tribes, in which all water resources were locally earned as rainfall, the coefficient of correlation between the two variables approached 0.81. This coefficient expressed a systematic inverse logarithmic relationship between the amount of rainfall and the land required to support a tribal population. Further, it carried the implication that tribal populations tended to approximate a constant of 500 persons, based on estimates of tribal size from a variety of observers. The unexplained variance in this statistical relationship amounted to 35% of the total and included a variety of errors in ascertainment, as well as deviations in tribal numbers from the postulated constant. The exercise served to validate the assumption previously made (1950) that tribal numbers in Australia approached a constant value.

During the year 1973, as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and in the Department of Prehistory at the Australian National University, Canberra, it was possible to reexamine the relationships between Aboriginal men and their land in Australia at a much more complex level than previously undertaken. The high-speed computer has become available since the first attempt, and extensive resources in a first-class research institution provided the time and data necessary. During the 20 years that have intervened since 1953, the environmental data on continental Australia have increased enormously; it may now be one of the best studied continents in the world in these terms.

Over a very large area of the central desert and the Northern Territory of Australia the aboriginal populations were characterized by an unusual demographic feature, a remarkable difference in age between spouses at first marriage. Among the various dialect groups the average age of the woman at first marrage was 15 to 20 years less than that of her husband. This is a demographic feature which obviously requires explanation and there have been at least three explanations advanced to date.

Many studies have recently appeared in which an attempt was made to derive age-specific birth and death rates from anthropological populations. The display of age-specific death rates usually takes the form of an abridged life table; fertility rates are rarer in the literature. One recent compendium has discussed the construction of life tables for skeletal populations (Acsádi and Nemeskéri 1970). In another work, I have argued that the fragmentary nature of anthropological data and the problems of sampling from small populations required the use of various smoothing techniques in order to make the construction of life tables and vital rates meaningful (Weiss 1973); in that work, I suggested the use of stable population theory as a means of data smoothing, and a set of model life tables based on that theory were determined for use with fragmentary demographic data.

Both direct and indirect means of constructing life tables and vital rates from anthropological data involve inference from a census and very little additional data, since that is usually all that is available to us.

Anthropologists have become increasingly aware of the importance of population as a factor in a systematic view of human biological and cultural development. This awareness has generated an interest in the field of demography, and consequently, techniques once utilized almost exclusively by demographers are now frequently utilized for anthropological studies. Anthropological-paleodemographic inquiry traditionally starts with the excavation of a skeletal population sample. The sample is aged and sexed, and the data are put into a descriptive analytic model–the life table. The life table, through a process of inference, is taken to represent the life processes of a local biological population and often forms the basis for further inference on the relationships between populational and cultural processes (Green and others 1974; Howell-Lee 1971).

Critics have questioned the assumption of life table construction and cited various sources of error in data collection to argue against the use of life tables as a source of inference concerning the biological population. In this paper we will attempt to address some of these sources of error. Specifically, we will discuss the effects of enumeration errors, population growth, and small population size on life table values. To assess the impact of these errors on life table values of “anthropological” populations, we make use of computer simulation. We conclude that, once the implications of these factors are understood, the life table can provide a useful model for paleodemographic research.

There is a long history of interest in the study of extinct populations, sometimes called “prehistoric demography” or “archaeological demography.” Most studies have focused on regional population size and trends through time and their explanation. Analyses of a single population at one community are rare.

This paper discusses one effort at assessing the dynamics of population at one prehistoric community, the Grasshopper Pueblo, located in east-central Arizona. A long range program of archaeological research is being conducted at the site by the University of Arizona through the Archaeological Field School. This program is sponsored jointly by the Department of Anthropology and the Arizona State Museum and has been supported by the National Science Foundation since 1965.

The Grasshopper Ruin, a fourteenth century pueblo, is an example of what some have called “Late Mogollon” or “Prehistoric Western Pueblo” culture. It consists of several main room clusters separated by a presently intermittent stream and surrounded by smaller groupings of rooms. There are approximately 500 rooms at the site. Space does not permit a discussion of the range of problems that we are attempting to solve in our research nor the sampling design. But one aspect of our work, the “Cornering-Growth Project,” has provided us with the relative construction sequences for all the rooms at the community. These data provide a basis for a study of population dynamics.

During the Last Ten Years we have acquired a much better understanding of Band Society—the socio-cultural system that characterizes the behavior of most hunter-gatherers (Lee and DeVore 1968; Sahlins 1972; Williams 1974). The same decade has also added considerable detail to explanations of the evolution of Band Society into more complex socio-cultural systems (Binford 1968; Flannery 1968, 1969). Compared to its steady state and its demise, the origins of Band Society have received much less attention. This lack of concern is particularly perplexing given the rapid accumulation of paleoanthropological and archaeological data on human origins in the sixties and early seventies. In order to stimulate discussion in this area of anthropological research, this paper deals with the origins of one subsystem of band society—the mating strategies. The research reported here focuses on the effect of mating strategies and population size on age specific fertilities and on their potential role in the origins of the incest taboo.

Three areas of hunter-gatherer demography are immediately relevant to Band Society origins: population density, mating network, and population growth. Ethnographically studied huntergatherers characteristically live at population densities below one person per square kilometer (Sanders and Price 1968), the population which exchanges mates is usually not much larger than 500 (Birdsell 1968; Wobst 1974), and band societies generally show intrinsic rates of growth near zero (Weiss 1973). There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that prehistoric hunter-gatherers, on the average, had greater population densities, larger mating networks, or more rapid growth rates. If these factors were already operative during the Pleistocene, we can ask ourselves how they would have affected demographic processes earlier in human evolution.

Birdsell (1968:231) summarizes qualitative predictions for the dynamics of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer populations. He concludes that population density should respond rapidly to changes in biotic and climatic parameters; that “populations would tend to overshoot carrying capacity as they restore their numbers from a depressed condition,” and that so long as unoccupied areas existed, population density would be regulated at a level well below carrying capacity (see also Binford 1968). We believe that these conclusions can be strengthened and quantified by formal mathematical analysis of reasonable demographic models. The results of this analysis have several important implications for archaeological theory and methodology.

Formal models of population dynamics usually lead to predictions of population behavior over time intervals on the order of the generation time of the organism or longer. Since our direct knowledge of population history of regions is usually in proportion to the amount of recent disruption, archaeology can test and exploit theory in a manner denied ethnology.

In this Essay, I will focus on inferences about the size of prehistoric populations based on estimates of the quantity of space utilized by those populations. I wish to recognize at the outset that there are many other data bases that have been employed by archaeologists in making inferences about prehistoric demography. While I do not intend to question the validity of alternative data bases for making paleo-demographic inferences, there are reasons why I believe that utilized space is potentially our most significant data base. Let us consider some of the alternatives.

(1) Simulation models. Simulation models are powerful tools for gaining insight into the demography of prehistoric populations. Yet, if the implications of such models are to be tested, a means of making direct inferences about the population of prehistoric groups is needed.

(2) Burial populations. Burial populations are likely to remain the data base from which the most comprehensive demographic inferences can be made. However, there are many areas of the world in which burial populations are so rare that one cannot count on using this data base. In addition, Cook (1972) and Baker and Sanders (1973) have identified a number of significant limitations on the utility of burial data.

Two prehistoric Southwestern societies, the Black Mesa Anasazi and the Winslow Tradition of the Hopi Buttes, are used to demonstrate different types of adaptation to an increasing population.

I indicate that changes in population density can be used to better understand the structure of society, as well as to investigate culture change. The role of demography, however, must be seen in the perspective of a single sub-system within the entire cultural and natural system. Viewed in this way, population pressure is a single part of the human ecosystem and not a simple cause or effect of culture change.

The holistic approach of cultural ecological studies in anthropology has, in the last decade, proven to be a generally successful means for helping to understand the structure of cultural systems and also for elucidating some of the processes of culture change. The ecosystem concept is important to anthropology because of its holistic and synthetic characteristics; nevertheless anthropologists, for a variety of reasons, have used the ecosystem approach on a relatively simplistic, mechanical level which has limited the success of even the better studies.

In my view, certain critical features of current population theory in demography, anthropology, and related fields are misleading. These anomalies have been incorporated into population theories, I argue, largely because the researchers in these fields have tended to be too specialized. Demography, a science rooted in occidental economics and sociology, is oriented toward the study of industrializing and industrialized societies, societies which are by no means representative of the entire range of human societies. Anthropologists, although they have dealt with a wider range of human societies, have tended to neglect the potential theoretical contributions of population ecology, the study of the population dynamics of nonhuman animals. The theory of human population dynamics which I offer here was developed with the value of generality and broad scope constantly in mind. The roots of this theory are in General Systems Theory, population ecology, ethnology, demography, and economics. I propose this population theory largely as a means of encouraging, within all of those sciences concerned with population matters, a new round of debate regarding existing population theories.

My aim here is to summarize briefly some serious difficulties with assumptions that have frequently been made in considerations of prehistoric population and culture changes, and to suggest better alternatives. I have discussed these matters more fully, with many more references, elsewhere (Cowgill in press).

One problematic assumption is the notion that a fairly strong tendency toward increase is a natural characteristic of human populations, or at least of sedentary food-producing populations. It is taken for granted that as a rule population growth will continue in a region until a point is reached at which further growth would create (or at least pose serious threat of) major shortages of important resources. A second fallacy is the assumption that stresses resulting from resource shortages will naturally tend to evoke developmental responses. Cultural development or evolution is frequently explained as a response to such stresses.