方法对比

	Osteological Age & Sex Estimation	Paleodemographic Analysis
领域	考古学	考古学
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	1994	1982
提出者	Jane Buikstra & Douglas Ubelaker (Standards synthesis)	Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel & Claude Masset (critique); Rostock School (hazard-model solution)
类型	Standardized osteological pipeline for estimating age-at-death and biological sex	Inferential pipeline for estimating mortality, fertility, and age structure from skeletal age-at-death distributions
开创性文献	Buikstra, J. E., & Ubelaker, D. H. (1994). Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains. Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series No. 44. ISBN: 9781563490750	Bocquet-Appel, J.-P., & Masset, C. (1982). Farewell to Paleodemography. Journal of Human Evolution, 11(4), 321-333.
别名	Skeletal Age Estimation, Age-at-Death Estimation, Biological Profile Estimation, Osteological Aging and Sexing	Paleodemography, Skeletal Demography, Past Population Mortality Analysis, Osteological Demography
相关	2	2
摘要	Osteological age and sex estimation is the foundational bioarchaeological procedure for building a biological profile from human skeletal remains: estimating how old an individual was at death and determining their biological sex. The skeleton changes in patterned ways across life — teeth form and erupt, growth plates fuse, and joint surfaces and bone microstructure gradually degenerate — and these changes are scored against reference standards to bracket age, while sexually dimorphic features of the pelvis and skull indicate sex. The standardized recording protocols compiled by Jane Buikstra and Douglas Ubelaker provide the discipline's shared methodology, ensuring that age and sex estimates are comparable across analysts and collections. Because the relationship between skeletal change and chronological age is variable, the method emphasizes multiple indicators and explicit uncertainty.	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.