Objectives: The present paper highlights the potential of osteoarchaeological data for demographic questions by developing and applying an Bayesian approach with published age-estimations of adults.
Materials and methods: For this, the Metropolis of London is a rewarding study region due to the large number of cemeteries with thousands of individuals spanning a period from 1100 to the mid of 19th century that have been excavated and published in the last decades. Furthermore, London has a rich tradition of early written records on mortality for comparison purposes. In order to gain comparable results from the different source categories, we use a Bayesian framework throughout in which the Gompertz distribution features centrally.
Results: Intensive simulations show that the Bayesian approach is performing best compared to other approaches like Maximum Likelihood Estimation or Ordinary Least Squares in terms of recovering the original age distribution parameters. The comparison of written sources and osteoarchaeological data demonstrates their general comparability and highlights the much higher mortality among adults in London than in the rest of England and Wales. We show that population growth can severely impact mortality estimates and has to be taken into accounthas a strong effect on reconstructing diachronic mortality patterns.
Discussion: The osteoarchaeological data suggests that during medieval times and the early modern period, the modal age at death of the general population of London more or less remained constant and hovered around 30 years, only monks showed a higher modal age of about 45 years. However, from the 17th century onwards, life expectancy of adults increased markedly.
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