“Archaeology can’t give social scientists population or GDP, but here are some things we can measure that might be useful for social science.”

🫧 Open on Bubbles Apropos of our recent discussion on the estimation of historical population sizes, Sean Manning writes: Some archaeologists have measured house sizes for Gini-coefficient-style studies aside from studying human remains to measure nutrition and rates of illness. I think that was what Michael E. Smith meant when he talked about hypothetical data: “archaeology can’t give social scientists population or GDP, but here are some things we can measure that might be useful for social science.” I as