Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 140

(hbk); £17.99 (pbk). ‘If I had ham, I’d have ham and eggs, if I had eggs.’

Archaeological demography is defined by its goal, the reconstruction of past populations from skeletal remains. This apparently simple goal is, however, difficult to reach. Chamberlain provides a useful road map but not a total solution to the problems.

The goal of reconstruction of the population from skeletal remains used to be out of reach not only because the evidence available is chronically short in supply, a biased sample of the original material, and difficult-to-impossible to read rightly, but also because few archaeologists understood enough about the concepts and measures and theories of demography to be able to apply it accurately to the available materials. That is no longer the case, as witnessed by the present volume by Andrew Chamberlain.

Chamberlain understands that the concepts of demography are unusually clear, for a social science, in definition and in the use of redundant information, so that if one has a reliable indicator of part of the population structure it is often possible to estimate other quantities by simple subtraction. Hence if you have an accurate age distribution for last year and this year, we can find the death rate for each age segment by looking at the d ifference (migration raises its ugly head, but demographers have techniques to avoid it). If your accurate data is for ten years ago and this year, we can do the same trick, with a wider range of possible error. And if we have an accurate age distribution from ten years ago, and the birth rate and death rate for the years intervening, we can not only make a good estimate of the age distribution today, but we might use that accurate estimate as a way of critiquing the results of a census. At the same time, demographers tend to work on large and fully described populations, so that results are not even based on random samples but often on full counts of the population. Naturally archaeologists are often attracted to the techniques of demography to try to solve problems on small populations and partial measurements.

Written for graduate students at the University of Sheffield, the volume under review is a well-written, clearly argued and lucidly explained textbook for archaeologists who want to or need to apply demographic models and methods to archeological problems. They will find the technical expertise and the examples they need to apply the concepts to their material. They will also find intelligent discussions of side issues, and a 35-page bibliography that defines the field of archaeological demography. Chamberlain inspires confidence as he applies data and methods to isolated problems and produces new insights and clarity from the exercise. If I were still teaching graduate students demography, I wouldn’t hesitate to adopt it for my course.

But alas, archaeologists applying demography to their analyses will still not be able to solve all their problems by the mastery of the contents of this book. Having a confident grasp of the concepts and methods certainly helps, but the difficulties in raw materials persist. If an archaeologist has a substantial collection of skeletal materials (100 plus individuals) that represent a living inbreeding population over some reasonably short period of time (like a decade or two), if there is reason to believe that the preservation of materials is more or less random, and if the material is in sufficiently good condition that one can have confidence in methods of aging and sexing, the methods of modern demography can take you a long way to understand many aspects of the life of the past population. Unfortunately, these conditions seldom apply, and yet the material is all the more valuable for its scarcity and ambiguity.

Demographic methods are based on the assumption that you have a census and vital statistics (births and deaths) registration. In archaeology, you have none of the three. Typically you have a fragmentary skeletal collection, which may have been collected over a wide range of territory and perhaps over a long period of deposition. If the skeletons are not from an inbreeding living population, there is little that can be generalized from the collection. One may note many interesting things – size of skeletons, healed fractures, signs of disease, teeth ware, etc. But these observations do not confer an ability to reconstruct the living population from which the skeletons were produced.

Readers are in good hands using Chamberlain’s book to guide their research, but only optimists will expect to get all the way to the goal of population reconstruction.