Model life tables for pre-industrial populations: First application in palaeodemography

Abstract

Contemporary model life tables cannot accurately reconstruct the mortality patterns experienced by pre-industrial populations. It has thus become essential to develop mortality models that are adapted to the populations studied by paleodemographers, and that fulfil a threefold objective: to be based on a sufficiently large set of tables representing early mortality at diverse times and places; to use entries that can be easily obtained from reliable and well-established anthropological indicators; and to take the population growth rate into account, despite the problem of calculating it from bone remains. Our models are based on linear regressions that link the logarithm of mortality probabilities to a demographic variable or to one of the paleodemographic indicators suggested by J.-P Bocquet-Appel: the juvenility index, the p ratio (the deceased aged 5 to 19 years, over the deceased aged 5 years and over), and the mean age at death of adults, all of which are used as entries in the models constructed for men, women, and both sexes combined. Different growth rates are also used, for an interval from -0.01 to +0.01, by steps of 0.0025. For each entry, the set of models represents 75 model life tables, making it possible to estimate mortality by age and, under certain assumptions, some of the demographic indicators associated with it. If we assume that the demographic behaviour of archaeological populations closely resembles that of observed pre-industrial populations, we can propose an estimate of the demographic parameters of two ancient cemeteries in western France © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.