Jérôme Dubouloz

Impacts of the Neolithic Demographic Transition on Linear Pottery Culture Settlement

This study aims to look for a new signal of the demographic transition linked in time to the installation and development of an agro-pastoral lifestyle. Demographic growth has always been a component of models for the spread, during the second half of the sixth millenium BC, of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK), and the analysis of the space–time distribution of sites appears to confirm the hypothesis. Now a different signal is used here to examine in terms of quantitative trends the strength and rate of supposed growth: household size, measured by house groundplan surface-area. This criterion is particularly suitable because the data for houses are more accurate and manageable on a large scale than the data for the sites themselves. Thus the research issue can be addressed with a representative and uniform sample.