A stabilized maternal mortality rate estimator for biased skeletal samples

Abstract

This paper seeks to provide a stabilized (i.e. less vulnerable to differences in sex representation) equation for estimating maternal mortality for biased skeletal samples. The stabilized equation is developed and tested on the United Nations data used to develop the original method (McFadden and Oxenham, Current Anthropology, 60(1), 141–146), and is applied to 16 bioarchaeological samples from mainland Southeast Asia. First-order correlations and basic descriptive statistics were applied to the data. The stabilized equation was comparable in accuracy to the original equation. When applied to bioarchaeological samples, it proved to be advantageous where the sex ratio differed by more than 0.15 in either direction (i.e. more females or more males). The stabilized equation is an improvement over the original equation for samples that exhibit sex bias that is randomly distributed by age. This method extends the potential applications of the maternal mortality estimator.