The Miles Method and Averbuch: Implications for Paleodemography

The production of age-at-death distributions is an essential element in paleodemography. Such distributions rely on accurate aging techniques, and the most reliable of these use teeth. The Miles method is an aging technique that uses the molars from the juvenile portion of a skeletal assemblage to determine a tooth wear rate that may be projected into adults in order to determine adult age. This technique has been found to be fairly accurate in modern humans, fossil groups, and nonhumans.

Many authors have used the Miles method to create age-at-death distributions, and Caspari and Lee (2004) use their distributions to determine a ratio of old adults to young adults for four fossil hominid groups. These authors then interpret the increase in the ratios through time as an increase in human longevity with time. However, many authors have argued that skeletal assemblages do not represent the living population that produced them, and therefore studies such as Caspari and Lee's are flawed.

The purpose of this study is to calculate a similar old to young adult ratio for Averbuch, a Mississippian site in Tennessee. The juvenile teeth are aged and assigned wear scores, and the timing of transition from one wear stage to the next is determined using transition analysis. Adult ages are then calculated, allowing a ratio of old to young adults to be established. This ratio is then compared to the Caspari and Lee ratios, and the difficulties in assuming that age-at-death distributions are the same as living population structures are discussed.