Examines whether nomadism affects the ratio of average house floor area to average household size.

This short article argues that formulae utilized by archeologists for deriving populations from the floor areas of dwellings are flawed. The formulae in question are that of Naroll (1962), Clarke (1971), and Cook (1972) and he argues that each of these is either incorrect or simply too narrow or too broad. The author then puts forth his own formula for multifamily dwellings which he tests against a dataset of nine New World ethnographic examples. Finally, the author concludes that this type of formula needs to change depending on the type of dwelling in question.

This article investigates a possible association between mobility strategy and dwelling construction. The author tests a broad hypothesis that planned duration of use for a structure is positively associated with the investment costs in building a dwelling. Some operational hypotheses are supported; others are not.

This paper discusses the relationship between floor area and settlement population.

This study uses macroecological approaches to test the impact of climate, social environment, inter-group borrowing and cultural history on vernacular house architecture among 1140 societies. The authors suggest that certain features will be influenced: wall materials, ground plan, roof shape, and floor placement. They use mixed binary and multinominal regressions models to test these predictions. The results strongly support that climatic drivers, cultural continuity, and inter-group borrowing predict three out of the four features: wall materials, roof shape, and floor placement. Social drivers are a strong predictor of every feature tested.

This article employs logistic regression to test the relationship between house floor area and marital residence. Results indicate there is an association, but the relationship is stronger in a solely agricultural sample and nonexistent in a non-agricultural sample. This is likely due to the tendency for mobile groups to build several smaller homes for faster and more efficient household construction. Overall the authors suggest that floor area alone should not be taken as a sole indicator of marital residence.

The study suggests an archaeological indicator of matrilocal versus patrilocal residence. The cross-cultural samples suggest that matrilocal versus patrilocal residence can be simply and accurately predicted from the living floor area of the average house in the society.

This study builds on the work of Melvin Ember (1973) regarding living floor area of dwellings and its relationship to marital residence. The original results are replicated.

Author proposes and presents evidence in support of the theory that most societies practice virilocal or patrilocal residence (this is the "normal" pattern" and that matrilocal residence is adopted when societies migrate to an already populated area.

This study examines the association between post-marital residence patterns and dwelling size in pre-industrial societies using comparative methods and a global sample of 86 societies. The results suggest that matrilocality is associated with larger dwellings (over 65 square meters) in agricultural societies, while patrilocality is associated with smaller dwellings. The study also finds that sedentism is the single best predictor of house size. The study concludes that post-marital residence and house size evolve in a correlated fashion, which can help make reliable inferences about the social organization of prehistoric societies from archaeological records.