ABSTRACT
Age structures, or mortality patterns, in mammalian archaeofaunas reflect some very basic ecological relationships between humans and their prey. This chapter discusses several issues relevant to how mortality studies are conducted and what they can reveal about human behavior. Mortality data represent only one dimension of human foraging practices, yet they interest many zooarchaeologists for a number of reasons. Age structure models used in archaeology are based on the frequencies of individuals in a series of consecutive age cohorts of approximately equal duration. Archaeologists want data on prey populations that are independent of human effects, but, in selecting sources of these data, also need to know the temporal and spatial scales of the control sample. Finally, there are many research situations in which reliable data on reference populations simply do not exist; a species may be extinct or, if around, poorly known for a wide variety of reasons.
