Paleodemographic Analysis
Paleodemographic analysis reconstructs the demographic life of past populations — their mortality schedules, life expectancy, age structure, and fertility — from the age-at-death distributions of skeletal samples. It begins from the per-individual ages produced by osteological estimation and aggregates them into life tables or, increasingly, fits formal mortality models. The field was reshaped by Bocquet-Appel and Masset's bracing 1982 critique, 'Farewell to Paleodemography,' which exposed two fatal biases: the tendency of skeletal age estimates to mimic the age structure of the reference sample rather than the target population, and the corrupting effect of age-estimation error. The modern response, developed by the Rostock School and others, abandons naive life tables in favor of hazard models and Bayesian estimation that treat the observed data as the noisy product of a true mortality schedule.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Bocquet-Appel, J.-P., & Masset, C. (1982). Farewell to Paleodemography. Journal of Human Evolution, 11(4), 321-333. · DOI 10.1016/S0047-2484(82)80023-7
- Buikstra, J. E., & Ubelaker, D. H. (1994). Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains. Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series No. 44. · ISBN 9781563490750
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Related methods
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