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.