Title:	Population dynamics in the Middle Ages in Central Europe: Reconstruction based on age-at-death distributions of skeletal samples
Authors:	Galeta, Patrik Pankowská, Anna
Citation:	GALETA, P. PANKOWSKÁ, A. Population dynamics in the Middle Ages in Central Europe: Reconstruction based on age-at-death distributions of skeletal samples. JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE, 2023, roč. 156, č. August 2023, s. nestránkováno. ISSN: 0305-4403
Issue Date:	2023
Publisher:	Elsevier
Document type:	článek article
URI:	2-s2.0-85162887162 http://hdl.handle.net/11025/53894
ISSN:	0305-4403
Keywords in different language:	population dynamics;Middle Ages;Central Europe;age-at-death ratio;skeletal samples
Abstract in different language:	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 and predicted the growth and total fertility rates 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.
Rights:	Plný text je přístupný v rámci univerzity přihlášeným uživatelům © Elsevier
Appears in Collections:	Články / Articles (KSA) OBD

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