ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the distribution of injuries changes significantly during the Mesolithic compared with the Middle Paleolithic and Upper Paleolithic in an increased amount of perimortem injuries that show no sign of healing and are likely related to the cause of death. The higher levels of fragmentation in skeletal elements from the Paleolithic sites also render the counts of bones difficult to determine and unusable under many standard collection protocols. The chapter compares the admittedly novel measure of distribution of injuries by degrees of severity instead, so that is possible to meaningfully compare three periods such as Mesolithic, Middle Paleolithic and Upper Paleolithic, specifically to determine if there are statistically significant differences in patterns of injury. The Analysis of Contingency Tables Using Simulations (ACTUS) program was designed to address the problem of statistical analyses of two-way tables from small samples in determining whether to reject a null hypothesis of independence.
