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Epistemology of the Discipline

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Handbook of Palaeodemography

Part of the book series: INED Population Studies ((INPS,volume 2))

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Abstract

The palaeodemographic approach defined here is based on a single source: human bone remains, which are a precious biological archive. As must be done for all historical data, the limits of sources and of their representativeness are discussed, and ideas about age are explored.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Consequently, the source is only available where funerary practices involve conservation, such as burial. Cremated remains are hard to use and some funerary practices do not preserve the bones (corpses abandoned, exposed, or immersed). In some cases the bones cannot be studied simply because of their state of conservation.

  2. 2.

    Many studies compare the results obtained for a single site from cemetery data and historical demography data, with the occasional wide chronological discrepancy (Piontek and Weber 1990; Molleson and Cox 1993), without checking the respective representativeness of the sets of data. Some studies take care to compare results from the two sources for a single place and time, but with no consideration of the problems of estimating the age at death of individual skeletons (Saunders et al. 1995; Saunders and Herring 1995; Ortega Muñoz 2003).

  3. 3.

    We may cite Mann–Whitney and Wilcoxon’s tests, which can be used to compare two independent samples, and Krukskal-Wallis’s test, which determines whether k populations are identical and whether at least one of them tends to be different.

  4. 4.

    The influence of migration, and the effects due to small samples, are well described in Langaney 1988.

  5. 5.

    This section is based on a paper given to the AIDELF conference in Dakar, 2002 (Séguy and Buchet 2006b).

  6. 6.

    The number 7 had a great symbolic value in Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.

  7. 7.

    Late weaning is attested by both written sources and anthropological analyses (Gallien 1992; Herrscher 2003).

  8. 8.

    Age at which it is agreed that the girls of that period had their first periods (menarche) (Post 1973; Lett 1997).

  9. 9.

    Many mediaeval literary sources illustrate the early age of marriage for girls throughout the Middle Ages, at least in aristocratic society.

  10. 10.

    Infant baptism, just after birth, was far from general practice before the twelfth century, even in aristocratic families, who were the most Christianised (Alexandre-Bidon and Lett 1997).

  11. 11.

    Far from being sedentary, children in the Middle Ages often left their homes, or even their towns or villages, for events as varied as family recomposition after a separation or death of one of their parents; oblation (gift of a child to a monastery); marriage; starting work or apprenticeship; entering domestic service; fosterage (the aristocratic practice of entrusting an adolescent’s education to another lord). The practice of entrusting infants to wet-nurses appears to have been only marginal at that time; this was not true of child slavery, which involved much larger-scale migration.

  12. 12.

    For example, with respect to the drift in the closure of cranial sutures: (Masset 1982; Bocquet-Appel and Masset 1995; Simon 1983, 1987; Molleson and Cox 1993). More recently, Hoppa (2000b) has revealed morphological changes in the pubic symphysis between two chronologically distinct samples.

  13. 13.

    According to Masset and Castro e Almeida, “This is as yet only a statistical link, which we are largely unable to interpret… To settle this point, we lack too many data that lie inaccessible in the cemeteries”, (1990, p. 130).

  14. 14.

    See Chap. 4, Box 4.1, concerning the three Portuguese reference collections.

  15. 15.

    Concerning the creation of this collection, Gemmerich Pfister 1999.

  16. 16.

    Differences in age distributions by cranial closure may be observed between populations. They do not contradict the theory of biological uniformity, which holds that age distributions of stages of closure remain invariable.

  17. 17.

    This observation holds whatever the mode of calculation: frequencies of biological stages by age group (see Chap. 5) or frequencies of age groups for a given stage (prospective part, Chap. 13).

  18. 18.

    The influence of the reference collection would not be eliminated, but would be reduced to a flattening of the estimated distribution.

  19. 19.

    All the proposed solutions are based on the probability vector method, the only one used by French palaeodemographers until recent work by Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel (2008b) and Henri Caussinus and Daniel Courgeau in this handbook. Starting from the stage distribution observed in a given age group, the new proposed solution avoids the problems of a possible centuries-long drift and the influence of the structure of the reference population, since it depends only on the assumption of biological uniformity.

  20. 20.

    Some authors have criticised this choice of methodology on the grounds that natural populations never present an equal probability of dying in all age classes (Buikstra and Konigsberg 1985; Konigsberg and Frankenberg 1992; cited by Schmitt 2002).

  21. 21.

    They also include the corpses of people who donated their bodies to science, and those taken from morgues, autopsy rooms and prisons (see Yann Ardagna’s 2004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unité Histoire et Population, INED, Paris, France

    Isabelle Séguy

  2. CEPAM, UMR 7264 (CNRS, UNS), Nice, France

    Luc Buchet

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  1. Isabelle Séguy
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Séguy, I., Buchet, L. (2013). Epistemology of the Discipline. In: Handbook of Palaeodemography. INED Population Studies, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01553-8_2

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