Later, in the 1970s, critiques of palaeodemography and its applications to skeletal samples focused on the difficulty of obtaining accurate ages at death, especially for adults and sampling issues. In a series of publications, Bocquet in 1977 and 1986 (1977,1986) and Bocquet and Masset in 1982 and 1985 argued that demographic reconstructions from ancient skeletal samples are weakened by inaccuracy of age at death estimates and the underrepresentation of the very young in skeletal samples due to preservation issues. Their age at death criticism focused on their contention that age estimates are heavily influenced by the age structure of the reference sample used in developing the age methodology. They also argued that modern historical samples were of little use in modeling demographic factors in ancient samples.
Van Gerven and Armelagos responded to the age at death concern, pointing out that in their study of ancient Nubian remains from Egypt aged using methods developed from the Todd collection in Cleveland Ohio; their suggested age distribution for the ancient sample was different from that of the reference collection. Thus, their application of the methodology likely produced reliable age at death data for the ancient sample and was not just duplicating the ages of the Todd collection, as suggested by Bocquet and Masset.
Buikstra and Konigsberg also responded, arguing that sampling issues could be addressed using archaeological information and rigorous analysis. They did agree however on the need to improve methods of age estimation and statistical treatment of the data. Sampling issues can affect palaeodemographic reconstruction at a variety of levels but enumeration of infants is especially difficult. Taphonomic factors can produce poor preservation of infant remains since they lack the size and mineralization of older individuals. If remains are poorly preserved, they are more likely to be overlooked by excavators and excluded from the overall sample. Since low numbers of infants in mortuary samples may reflect combinations of low infant mortality/fertility and preservation, they can be difficult to evaluate. To avoid the issue of infant prescrvation, Buikstra et al. suggested using the proportion of the number of deaths over age 30 to the number over age five to evaluate mortality/fertility issues (see Paleopathology).
World History
