Estimating the age structure of a buried adult population: A new statistical approach applied to archaeological digs in France |
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Authors: | Isabelle Séguy Henri Caussinus Daniel Courgeau Luc Buchet |
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Affiliation: | 1. Institut national d'études démographiques (INED), Paris, France;2. Cultures et environnements‐Préhistoire‐Antiquité‐Moyen ?ge (CEPAM, UMR 7264, Université de Nice‐Sophia‐Antipolis‐CNRS), Nice, France;3. Institut de Mathématiques, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France |
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Abstract: | Paleodemographers have developed several methods for estimating the age structure of historical populations in absence of civil registration data. Starting from biological indicators alone, they use a reference population of known sex and age to assess the conditional distribution of the biological indicator given age. However, the small amount of data available and the unstable nature of the related statistical problem mean that most methods are disappointing. Using the most reliable reference data possible, we propose a simple statistical method, integrating the maximum amount of information included in the actual data, which quite significantly improves age estimates for a buried population. Here the method is applied to a French cemetery used from Late Antiquity to the end of the Early Middle Ages. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |
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Keywords: | paleodemography age estimation Bayesian methods mortality distributions Dirichlet |
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