ation of all the evidence pertaining to
this tribe.

Three primary avenues of approach are possible: ecological,
ethnographic, and archaeological. It is proposed to deal here with the
second, or ethnographic material. The principal sources are three in
number; the pertinent chapter in the Handbook, the extensive monograph
by Waterman (1920) and the village lists of Merriam (see Bibliography).
All these investigators inspected the terrain and interviewed many
informants during the decade 1900-1910. Hence their data have now
become definitive.

For calculating population from village data it is necessary to know
the number of houses per village and the number of inhabitants per
house. Both these variables depend for their value upon numerous
demographic and cultural factors and hence must be determined
separately for nearly every tribe studied. Kroeber has paid special
attention to the second variable, the number of inhabitants per house,
and has concluded that the best value for the Yurok is 7.5 persons.
Since all the contemporary accounts agree with this conclusion it may
be accepted as established.

With regard to the number of houses per village it must be admitted
that this factor is subject to wide variation both in locality and
time. The number of house pits observed many years after the village
itself has disappeared is likely to be unreliable for many reasons,
although it may be used as a first approximation in default of better
data. A safer guide is the memory of reliable informants or actual
house counts made by explorers or original settlers. These are the
sources of the values given by Kroeber and Waterman.

For the Yurok there are five chief compilations of villages, with and
without house counts:

1. _Kroeber._ This author shows (1925, p. 18) a list of fifteen
villages (four of them compound) which he says are "recent counts
of houses or house pits recollected as inhabited." In addition he
shows on his map (p. 9) a number of other towns, some of which he
regards, and so designates, as being temporarily or intermittently
inhabited and hence not to be included in any computation of
permanent population. The house counts from his list are shown in
table 2 (p. 92, herein) in the column headed "Kroeber, _modern
memories_."

2. _Kroeber._ On page 18 as well as on page 16 is given a census
for the fifteen villages mentioned above. This was made in 1852 by
a