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Article: Detecting plague: palaeodemographic characterisation of a catastrophic death assemblage.(Method)
- Article from:
- Antiquity
- Article date:
- March 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Antiquity Publications, Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Introduction
The palaeodemographic signatures of epidemics are of perennial interest to biological anthropologists. It has been demonstrated that patterns of human mortality generally demonstrate a high degree of uniformity across populations (Paine 2000:181). This is referred to as attritional mortality and is characterised by a high number of infant deaths, low numbers of adolescent deaths and a gradual increase in mortality throughout adulthood. By contrast, an episode of catastrophic mortality refers to a short-term mortality crisis in which a high risk of death applies to all age categories. The identification of catastrophic as opposed to attritional ...