Demographic and Architectural Retrodiction: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study in the South American Tropical Lowlands

This paper focuses on the demographic and architectural organization of a South Amerindian tropical-forest community. The household, as the most important social, economic, and behavioral unit in this society, is reflected in the strong quantitative relations between the floor areas of the various structure types and the associated number of occupants. In contrast, floor area/number of occupants relations at the nuclear-family level are quantitatively weak. Since the aboriginal household was also the most important economic and demographic social unit in the South American tropics, the present study may be used to estimate prehistoric settlement population levels using excavated data. As such, this study encourages the use of the direct-historical approach by archaeologists working in the lowlands of South America.