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

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F49777513%3A23330%2F23%3A43969033" target="_blank" >RIV/49777513:23330/23:43969033 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000961?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000961?via%3Dihub</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105816" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.jas.2023.105816</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

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

Original language description

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.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50404 - Anthropology, ethnology

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA19-17810S" target="_blank" >GA19-17810S: Fertility and population growth in Central Europe from Neolithic to Medieval times: an application of stochastic simulations</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2023

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE

ISSN

0305-4403

e-ISSN

1095-9238

Volume of the periodical

156

Issue of the periodical within the volume

August 2023

Country of publishing house

NL - THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS

Number of pages

11

Pages from-to

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UT code for WoS article

001034984300001

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85162887162