Archaeological Understandings on Prehistoric and Ancient Human Population: For Integrated and Scientific Approaches

Demographic understanding is crucial to the study of societies, either in the past or present. This is because it is believed that changes in population size and/or density in a given space were an impetus of and/or were generated by social, economic, and cultural transformations. This is also the case for archaeology. However, unlike demographic studies for modern populations, palaeodemography relevant to past populations that lack written records requires many more lines of evidence, and therefore many more directions of approaches. In recent times, these approaches have tended to rely heavily upon information from advanced analytical techniques, such as radiocarbon dating, genetic and isotopic analyses, GIS, and so on. Importantly, for an unimpaired understanding of palaeodemography, the information should be produced with scientific integrity—using scientific techniques does not always guarantee scientific integrity—and systematically synthesized. This paper critically reviews the current understanding of palaeodemography in global and Korean archaeology, which have adopted integrated and scientific approaches of the kind. In addition, certain ways of compensating for sampling bias and achieving a better understanding of the distributional patterns of regional and local populations are proposed.