| Abstract: |
A key dimension of systematic regional settlement pattern studies in many global regions, such as Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, is the use of those data to estimate long-term demographic trends. To date, such estimates have been less prevalent in the recent and rapidly expanding corpus of regional studies that are now being carried out in China. One of these archaeological investigations, focused on the Rizhao region of eastern Shandong Province, has provided locations and size estimates for ancient settlements dating from the later Neolithic through the Han period for a roughly 700 km² study area. Here, several methodological procedures, extrapolated from population estimation methods that have been employed in other world regions, are used to generate rough demographic ranges and trends for our investigatory region in eastern Shandong. For the Han period, these preliminary numbers dovetail reasonably with general population ranges derived from documentary sources, hopefully pointing to population estimation procedures that may have broader applications in constructing ancient Chinese demographic histories.
|
