Problemy i perspektywy badań paleodemograficznych nad kulturą wielbarską na przykładzie cmentarzyska w Kowalewku

In the history of the research into the Wielbark Culture there have been numerous attempts to use palaeodemographic analyses. In most cases, that kind of analysis applied to the Wielbark Culture consisted in constructing mortality tables. Reservations about that method were an impulse for the authors to write the present article. The key element in the research on human beings’ physical remains, i.e. on death, is to find out how they lived and functioned in their environment, society, culture. The funeral and its rites convey a lot of meanings, which nowadays might be illegible. It results from methodological limitations of archaeology or anthropology, from the culture the symbols of which contained in the burials are not always clear, and from a loss of a certain amount of information. In the present article the authors have used the method suggested by I. Séguy and her team, which is an extension of the method of J. P. Bocquet and C. Masset. Thanks to that it has been possible to assess the probability of death. The method comprises the mortality tables of pre-industrial societies with no access to health care system from all over the world. On account of the difficulty in indicating the sex of children, a new model has been created that is based on 167 tables; as its input data the following indices have been used: juvenility index (JI = D5–14/D20–ω), P (P = D5–19/D5–ω) and the average age of people over 20 years old (a20). The authors have analysed site 12 (Oborniki County) of the biritual burial grounds of the Wielbark Culture. The site has been comprehensively researched, so theoretically there is a complete picture of the population. The early medieval burial site in Kałdus has been analysed in the similar way, which made it possible to compare the results of site no 12 with the cemetery where only the skeleton rite was used. The results have been presented in Table 1 and illustrated with Diagrams 2 and 3. The indices for the site in Kowalewko are: JI = 0.286; P = 0.337; and a20 = 34.2. The probability of children’s death aged 0–5 years is 548‰ for the stationary population and 490‰ for the stable population. The probability of a newborn’s death is about 300‰ in both models, which seems typical of the pre-industrial populations. The indices JI and P for the site in Kowalewko are quite high in comparison to the model data of e0 = 20 years (Model ‘West’), which equals 0.16. The high value may result from a significant increase in population, but it al