ABSTRACT
The study of the age-at-death continues to be a principal criterion of analysis when assessing and exploring the health and socio-cultural practices of prehistoric populations. Unfortunately, a greater understanding and knowledge of the experience of being ‘old’ or ‘elderly’ in prehistory remains broadly elusive in archaeological discourse. It has been suggested that this reluctance to deal with the issue of old age may be a function of methodological barriers, limited sample sizes or intrinsic bias towards particular subject groups, i.e. the elderly (Welinder, 2001; Lucy, 2005; Sofaer, 2006; Gowland, 2009; Appleby, 2010, 2011; Cave and Oxenham, 2014). The lack of research in archaeology with regards to the study of the elderly and the aging process is in contrast to that of other disciplines such as history (Johnson, 2005), sociology (Ginn and Arber, 1995; Fry, 1996; Carr and Moorman, 2011), psychology (Cohen, 1994; Hess, 2006; Hummert, 2011), social gerontology (Marshall and Bengston, 2011) and anthropology (Arber and Ginn, 2005; Yee, 2009), which have sought to understand and explain the experience and expectation of the aging subject in the latter phase of the life-course through time and across multiple cultural settings (Lucy, 2005; Sofaer, 2006; Gowland, 2009; Appleby, 2010).
