Raoul Naroll's Contribution to Archaeology

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Abstract
Raoul Naroll's 1962 American Antiquity article on the floor area of dwellings and its relation to population has had a profound impact on archaeology. Not only did it provide an objective mechanism to estimate population size and hence to evaluate demographic models of cultural evolution, it also helped to spark a wide variety of cross-cultural investigations of settlement form and its relation to social, political, and economic organization. In this article, the author offers an example of one such study focusing on the permeability of communities. Permeability is the extent to which dwellings are embedded in a community, measured by a graph-theoretical index. A holocultural analysis is used to demonstrate a strong, positive relationship between frequency of war and community permeability. The author discusses the utility of identifying this relationship for archaeological research, particularly for evaluating conflict-oriented models of cultural evolution.

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