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Paleodemographic age‐at‐death distributions of two Mexican skeletal collections: A comparison of transition analysis and traditional aging methods
Author(s) -
Bullock Meggan,
Márquez Lourdes,
Hernández Patricia,
Ruíz Fernando
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american journal of physical anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1096-8644
pISSN - 0002-9483
DOI - 10.1002/ajpa.22329
Subject(s) - transition (genetics) , gerontology , demography , medicine , sociology , biology , genetics , gene
Traditional methods of aging adult skeletons suffer from the problem of age mimicry of the reference collection, as described by Bocquet‐Appel and Masset (1982). Transition analysis (Boldsen et al., 2002) is a method of aging adult skeletons that addresses the problem of age mimicry of the reference collection by allowing users to select an appropriate prior probability. In order to evaluate whether transition analysis results in significantly different age estimates for adults, the method was applied to skeletal collections from Postclassic Cholula and Contact‐Period Xochimilco. The resulting age‐at‐death distributions were then compared with age‐at‐death distributions for the two populations constructed using traditional aging methods. Although the traditional aging methods result in age‐at‐death distributions with high young adult mortality and few individuals living past the age of 50, the age‐at‐death distributions constructed using transition analysis indicate that most individuals who lived into adulthood lived past the age of 50. Am J Phys Anthropol 152:67–78, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.