Fertility and analogy in Pacific palaeodemography

Understanding the palaeodemography of Pacific populations is fundamental to interpreting biological and cultural transformations in pre-Contact Pacific island societies, but skeletally based reconstructions of past demography are of questionable utility. This paper argues that the use of historic and contemporary population studies, which describe the dynamic of population change in ecological context, offers a particuarly rich source of material for palaeodemographic inference. Structural similarities between pre-European and historic demographies allow analogies to be drawn backwards, providing an underused means for examining the ecological and behavioural correlated and tempo of population expansion, the nature of responses to population collapse, and repertoires of internal population regulation in Pacific prehistory. -from Author