Relating structure to process in historical population analysis: case studies from eighteenth century Spanish America.

The relationships between patterns and processes have long been debated, as have the merits and defects of cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. The author reviews the utility of these approaches in the context of two brief studies that involve the components basic to any historical population research, namely births, marriages, migration and death. In Caracas, widely spaced cross-sections of data at the city level can mask important processes operating at lower levels. In Cordoba, the distribution of kin and god-kin suggests socio-economic structuring that facilitates the interpretation of household and family change, and population migration between and within the settlement.-after Author