2003/06/01 by Stephen A. Kowalewski · 39 citations
Arts and Humanities · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Archaeology #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Biology #Cartography #Demographic history #Demography #Ecology #Economics #Economy #Ethnography #Ethnology #Geography #Historical demography #History #Human ecology #Latin American history and culture #Law #Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics #Period (music) #Political science #Politics #Population #Research methodology #Scale (ratio) #Sociology #Term (time)
paper · doi:10.1525/aa.2003.105.2.313
published in American Anthropologist 105(2), 313-325 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2003/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Explicit attention to scale provides ways to relate the long run of archaeology to the shorter moments of ethnography and history, and ways to link biology and ecology to political economy. In the Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, the long–term history of the aggregate, regional population was constrained by relatively stable factors of human biology and ecology. However, significant, patterned variation in shorter–term, disaggregated, local demographic change was caused by shifts in political economy, both in the past and in recent times. Such conclusions are made possible by an unusual datasetthat combines recent, historical, and archaeological population estimates for a whole region covering a 3,500–year period, from initial settled villages to the present, for every place ever inhabited. [Keywords: population, demography, political economy, Oaxaca, Mexico]