方法对比

	Historical Life Table Construction	Aggregative Parish Register Analysis
领域	Historical Demography	Historical Demography
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	1662	1981
提出者	John Graunt (origins); Coale, Demeny, Ledermann (model life tables); applied by Wrigley-Schofield and Bengtsson	E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield (Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure)
类型	Mortality estimation and survivorship modelling	Time-series compilation and demographic indexing
开创性文献	Wrigley, E. A., & Schofield, R. S. (1981). The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction. Edward Arnold / Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674690073	Wrigley, E. A., & Schofield, R. S. (1981). The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction. Edward Arnold / Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674690073
别名	Historical mortality table building, Model life table fitting, Survivorship reconstruction, Paleodemographic life tables	Parish register aggregation, Vital series analysis, Baptism-burial counting, Aggregative back-projection input
相关	4	4
摘要	Historical life table construction is the craft of converting the patchy mortality evidence of the past—burial registers, family genealogies, monastic obituaries, even skeletal age-at-death distributions—into the formal apparatus of the life table: age-specific death rates, the probability of dying within each age interval, the number of survivors to each age, and expectation of life. The life table descends from John Graunt's 1662 reading of London's Bills of Mortality and Halley's Breslau table, but applying it to historical populations demands special care, since exposures are rarely known and deaths are often recorded without reliable ages. Historians therefore lean heavily on families of model life tables to smooth noisy data and fill missing age bands. Whether built as period tables capturing a single era's mortality or cohort tables following one birth-year group through life, these reconstructions are the indispensable summary of how, and how long, people lived in the past.	Aggregative parish register analysis is the foundational technique of English historical demography, compiling the simple monthly and annual counts of baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in parish registers into continuous long-run series. Unlike family reconstitution, it does not identify individuals; it treats the registers as a barometer of the community's vital pulse. By assembling such counts from hundreds of parishes, Wrigley and Schofield built national series stretching back to 1538, the year English parochial registration began. From the relation between baptisms and burials one infers natural increase or decline; sharp spikes in burials betray mortality crises from famine or epidemic; the monthly distribution of events exposes the seasonality of marriage, conception and death. The method is comparatively economical, scalable across many parishes, and supplies the raw input series that inverse projection later transforms into full reconstructions of population size and structure.