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Stable Populations and Skeletal Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Lisa Sattenspiel  and
Henry Harpending
Lisa Sattenspiel
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131
Henry Harpending
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131
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Abstract

A common procedure in paleodemography is to use mean skeletal age to estimate the expectation of life at birth in a population. This paper shows that skeletal age and expectation of life at birth are not equivalent unless the population is stationary. This assumption is not justified for most real populations. We show that mean skeletal age is approximately equivalent to the reciprocal of the birth rate and is not correlated with the death rate. Thus, the practice of inferring changes in life span and death rates from changes in mean age at death is not reliable and most conclusions of paleodemographic studies should be revised. On the other hand, skeletal age may provide high-quality information about fertility in archaeological populations. Several published paleodemographic studies are reinterpreted in light of the model presented.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 1983 , pp. 489 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1983

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