Village composition implied by a paleodemographic life table: The Libben Site

Lovejoy and colleagues excavated some 1327 skeletons deposited around 800 to 1100 A.D. at a site near Lake Erie in Ohio, called Libben. Examination of the implications of the life table presented for the living group which produced the cemetery shows that it would have had to be an extremely young population, in which many of the children would be orphans, in which the adults would have had to work hard and effectively to support the group, and almost none of whom would have lived long enough to become grandparents. The unusual and implausible features of the population structure can be interpreted as direct evidence on prehistoric living conditions, or alternatively, as a caution that the life table may include sources of error or bias.