Demographic Disturbance and the Use of Life Tables in Anthropology

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Abstract
Many studies have recently appeared in which an attempt was made to derive age-specific birth and death rates from anthropological populations. The display of age-specific death rates usually takes the form of an abridged life table; fertility rates are rarer in the literature. One recent compendium has discussed the construction of life tables for skeletal populations (Acsádi and Nemeskéri 1970). In another work, I have argued that the fragmentary nature of anthropological data and the problems of sampling from small populations required the use of various smoothing techniques in order to make the construction of life tables and vital rates meaningful (Weiss 1973); in that work, I suggested the use of stable population theory as a means of data smoothing, and a set of model life tables based on that theory were determined for use with fragmentary demographic data. Both direct and indirect means of constructing life tables and vital rates from anthropological data involve inference from a census and very little additional data, since that is usually all that is available to us.