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Confidence Intervals in the Analysis of Mortality and Survivorship Curves in Zooarchaeology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Max Price ,
Jesse Wolfhagen  and
Erik Otárola-Castillo
Max Price*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
Jesse Wolfhagen
Affiliation:
Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794
Erik Otárola-Castillo
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907
*
(maxpriee@fas.harvard.edu)
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Abstract

The analysis of age-at-death data, derived from epiphyseal fusion and dental eruption/wear patterns, is one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of zooarchaeologists studying past hunting and herd management practices. Zooarchaeologists typically analyze age-at-death data by constructing survivorship and mortality curves in order to allow insight into a variety of ecological and economic relationships between humans and animals. Since adopting such practices in the middle of the twentieth century, zooarchaeologists have proposed several methods for analyzing these curves, including visual examination and hypothesis testing. Creating confidence intervals is complementary to these two methods, allowing practitioners to graphically represent survivorship and mortality while testing hypotheses and accounting for sample sizes, which are often small in zooarchaeological assemblages. We discuss the basic concepts behind the nature of age-at-death data and the analysis of mortality and survivorship curves. We then describe how to calculate confidence intervals using bootstrapping techniques for both dental eruption/wear data and epiphyseal fusion data. To enable future users to replicate our methods, we introduce the freely available online R package “zooaRch” (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zooaRch/ ), which includes a vignette to guide first-time users.

El análisis de los datos de edad a la muerte derivada de la fusion de las epífisis y la erupción dental o patrones de desgaste, es una de las herramientas más potentes a disposición de zooarqueólogos quienes estudian las prácticas de caza en el pasado y la gestión de los rebaños. Curvas de supervivencia y mortalidad que se pueden derivar de estos datos, permiten comprender una variedad de relaciones ecológicas y económicas entre humanos y animales. Desde el comienzo del uso de esta metodología a mediados del siglo 20, los zooarqueólogos han propuesto varios métodos para el análisis de datos de sobrevivencia y mortalidad, incluyendo exámenes visuales o pruebas de hipótesis. La creación de los intervalos de confianza se complementa con ambos métodos, lo cual permite a los investigadores representar a los datos de sobrevivencia o mortalidad a través de gráficas, y deja que al mismo tiempo puedan probar la hipótesis y tomar en cuenta el tamaño de la muestra, la cual es normalmente pequeña en los casos de zooarqueología. Después de una discusión sobre los conceptos básicos detrás del análisis de sobrevivencia, se describe cómo calcular intervalos de confianza para los gráficos de estas curvas utilizando tanto los datos de la erupción / desgaste dental y los datos de fusión de las epífisis a través de técnicas de bootstrapping. Para que los usuarios futuros puedan replicar nuestros métodos, se introduce el paquete gratis de R “zooaRch” (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zooaRch/), que se puede encontrar en su pagina de web que incluye una viñeta para guiar los usuarios probando el programa por primera vez.

Type
Reports
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 157 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by the Society for American Archaeology.

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