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

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 asked Manning where the quote came from, and he replied: I think I got the idea from this response by Smith to a published paper: This model of inequality in the Aztec Empire is not based on empirical data. While there is nothing wrong with hypothetical models per se, the paper is phrased as if it presents empirical findings. … There are simply not enough data available to do the kind of analysis presented in this paper. The tweaking of data and methods do not produce results that satisfy me as being…