Life tables in palaeodemography: A methodological note

Several errors in the early literature discussing life-table analysis of skeletal populations are potentially misleading to the researcher unacquainted with the mathematical methods of palaeodemography. Additional errors document the hazards of borrowing life-table methods and equations from other applications without fully realizing their context, interpretation, and the potential restrictions on their use. A simple generalization of the life-table equations explicitly to reveal their dependence on the entry age and width of the age intervals used will facilitate the correct computation of life tables and readily accommodate the use of unconventional or otherwise non-standard cohorts. A general procedure for computing a life table for a skeletal population is presented, and a numerical example is included to illustrate the method.     

Infant taphonomy

In almost all living creatures, in Primates as well as in seventeenth–eighteenth century human populations, a high infant mortality is the rule; therefore, the scarcity of children's bones in cemeteries is suspicious from a demographic point of view. Though possible in some cases, sociological causes appear less important than the peculiar behaviour of infants' bones in the tomb. This paper examines the physico-chemical properties of infants' bones and their consequences for the preservation of archaeological samples; it proposes a new way of approaching distributions at death in the past. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd