Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and French paleodemography

Reconstructing the demography of populations having made little or no use of writing or the recording of key events, such as births, marriages, migration, and deaths, is not a simple task. Ingeniousness is required to establish via material sources a tenuous link with the demographic behaviour of the populations having produced them, naturally for other ends. Drawing on disciplines complementary to demography and archeology, Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel produced highly original work. On both a micro and macro scale, his research embraced the long history of Homo sapiens. His demographic interpretation of archeological information was based on models and theories stemming from demography, ethnology, and ecology, and on an original approach to primary data.