Population dynamics in the Middle Ages in Central Europe: Reconstruction based on age-at-death distributions of skeletal samples

Abstract

Demography plays an important role in domains related to socio-cultural complexity, subsistence strategies, and cultural ecology. Although the Middle Ages in Central Europe (ca. 500–1500 CE) was a period of major political, economic, and socio-cultural change arising from the establishment of the first principalities and the adoption of Christianity by the West Slavic tribes, our knowledge about its population dynamics is based only on archaeological studies and rare historical sources. This study is based on skeletal data. We predicted population growth and fertility levels using the proportion of non-adults in skeletal samples quantified with the D5+/D20+ ratio (the ratio of the number of skeletons older than 5 years to the number of skeletons of those older than 20 years). We adopted a new methodology that accounts for stochastic variation in small-sized skeletal samples. We computed the D5+/D20+ ratio in a large sample of 59 skeletal samples (12,805 individuals) from four chronological stages of the Middle Ages. Assuming that the D5+/D20+ ratio is a growth and fertility rate indicator, we predicted the growth and total fertility rates of the communities from which the skeletal samples were drawn and reconstructed their profiles over the chronological frame between 500 and 1500 CE. Our main result is that the growth and fertility rates increased during the politically and economically favourable period of the Great Moravian Empire (9th century CE) and then dropped significantly after the collapse of the whole system in the Post-Great Moravian Period (900–1200 CE). We estimate that the decline in fertility represented a decrease of 1.0–1.2 children per woman, on average. We hypothesize that the observed fertility change might be a response to deteriorated conditions, which decreased overall reproductive success.