Scale and the Explanation of Demographic Change: 3,500 Years in the Valley of Oaxaca

Abstract

Explicit attention to scale provides ways to relate the long run of archaeology to the shorter moments of ethnography and history, and ways to link biology and ecology to political economy. In the Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, the long–term history of the aggregate, regional population was constrained by relatively stable factors of human biology and ecology. However, significant, patterned variation in shorter–term, disaggregated, local demographic change was caused by shifts in political economy, both in the past and in recent times. Such conclusions are made possible by an unusual datasetthat combines recent, historical, and archaeological population estimates for a whole region covering a 3,500–year period, from initial settled villages to the present, for every place ever inhabited. [Keywords: population, demography, political economy, Oaxaca, Mexico]