10. Expoloring Age - Transition Analysis as a Tool for Detecting the Elderly

Nina Maaranen,Jo Buckberry

doi:10.31265/ams-skrifter.v0i26.215

Abstract

The growth of gender archaeology has improved the inclusion of female and juvenile narratives in archaeological discourse, enabling us to better understand interactions between groups defined by both social and physiological differences. There has been a notable absence of elderly in research, however, that is not simply a question of attitudes but of methodological limitations. The emergence of biostatistics has offered novel ways to combat common issues such as age mimicry and avoid the problematic nature of culturally loaded descriptive terminology. A test performed on Transition Analysis by Boldsen et al. (2002), generates individual age estimates, which allow for better differentiation between individuals and age groups, such as the ‘45+ older adults’. Further research into biostatistical methods will not only improve objectivity but bring much-needed attention to the elderly, including their narrative into the investigation of family dynamics and adult-juvenile interactions.

Highlights

Age-at-death is used by a large range of disciplines assessing and interpreting skeletal changes
In this chapter we describe the mechanics behind currently favoured age estimation methods, explain the cause of the main issues plaguing these methods and introduce the ‘new’ statistical framework suggested for the analysis of age-at-death
Transition Analysis was tested on Series A, a known age-at-death sample from a larger skeletal collection held at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki

Summary

Introduction

Age-at-death is used by a large range of disciplines assessing and interpreting skeletal changes. As the effects of extrinsic factors accumulate with increasing age, so do the age ranges This has caused a common practice to use terminal age intervals which begin as early as forty-five years of age. This skews our views of the age structure of past societies, leading to perceptions that in most past populations people did not survive past middle age (Van Gerven and Armelagos 1983; Meindl and Russell 1998; Milner and Boldsen 2012), but it obscures the presence of the old, disrupting our understanding of the agency held by older individuals as well as the dynamics between groups

Methods

Results

Conclusion