Problemy i perspektywy badań paleodemograficznych nad kulturą wielbarską na przykładzie cmentarzyska w Kowalewku
Problems and Prospects of Palaeodemographic Research on the Wielbark Culture Exemplified with the Kowalewko Burial Site

Summary/Abstract: 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 also occurs in catastrophic profiles. It may also be a result of underestimating the population, in the case of the Wielbark Culture – by an inferior number of men compared to women. Higher values of these coefficients may be the result of a significant increase of fertility or catastrophic events. They also can be a result of underestimating the number of individuals on the cemetery. It allows to bypass the problem of underestimation of children. In the case of the Wielbark Culture it seems that part of the males were buried outside the cemetery or in a way that does not allow a credible anthropological analysis (for example cremation). The disproportion between the number of women and men indicates a significant underestimation of the adults on the cemetery in Kowalewko. The differences in results of probability of death between the sites in Kowalewko and Kałdus can be explained by different fertility or environmental stress. However, it seems more likely that they are the result of disturbances in the representation of different age categories on the cemeteries. Palaeodemographic research on the Wielbark Culture is very difficult and it is not always possible to obtain reliable results. The main problems of that kind of research include poor state of bones preservation, cremation and cultural influences. As an effect in palaeodemographic research we miss a big part of the population. As a consequence, the conclusions about palaeodemographic structures may contain errors.

• Details
• Contents