Demography from Late Neolithic graves NW of Paris

Abstract

Estimating population from archaeological data involves understanding the representativeness of the supporting material, its chronology and its duration. The Bury grave, located NW of Paris and dated from the late fourth and third millennia BCE, provides all the data for a precise characterisation of more than three hundred dead. The living population was estimated, both qualitatively and quantitatively, on the basis of chronological modeling and references from historical demography for pre-industrial populations.

The results show a major societal shift between the short first phase of the grave use (late fourth millennium BCE), which corresponds to a real community, and the more extensive second phase during the third millennium BCE, which contains a more drastic selection of dead.

We propose to consider the results from Bury as a reference for other graves, which did not provide all the information required for demographic analysis. Bury was thus used to examine the Late Neolithic population of the area located NW of Paris, which corresponds to the main concentration of large collective and megalithic graves, named allées sépulcrales. No less than ten thousand people lived in this area of 2500 km² during the last centuries of the fourth millennium BCE. It can be assumed that the very high concentration of megalithic burials between northern Germany and southern Sweden refers to a situation identical to that of the Paris area.