If we can accept these speculative figures, there may be about 2 million people missing from the official record books. If this were true, the number of famine dead could be much higher than previously thought. One of the elements of past life that interests archaeologists is the population size of past settlements. They could figure the number of people who once could have lived inside an excavated homesite based upon other comparative information. The figures presented by prehistoric archaeologists, though interesting, are always debatable because, by definition, they can never be judged against independent information from the same site.
Prehistory literally means before writing.
But historical archaeologists do have access to written records, no matter how flawed the accounts may be judged to be. In the Strokestown area, we can estimate the average family size per house based on estate records and other non-census documents. If we were to excavate this village and discover that it actually contained ten houses, then we could be reasonably certain that this townland held twice as many people as officially reported. Regrettably, archaeology is an expensive and a time-consuming proposition. We have only begun to scratch the surface in the Strokestown area and it will take years for us, or anyone else who cares to do it, to excavate an entire famine-era village.