MA.CRO.S. ARCHEO (THE MATURING AND GROWTH OF THE HUMAN SKELETON – NEW METHODS APPLICABLE TO ARCHAEOLOGY)

The "MA.CRO.S. ARCHEO" project is an exploratory project started from scratch, with the objective of gaining a better understanding of the maturing and growth of skeletons in archaeological human populations. This project comes fully under LabEx LaScArBx’s theme group 1 “Settlement and territories”. In fact, understanding the evolution of the growth process in the long term must be considered within the most general context of the relations between the ancient societies and their environment. The growth of the human species is a complex process subject to many biological, environmental and societal factors. Clinical models currently available are validated for post-Jenner and post-antibiotics populations that are not deprived. They cannot pretend to represent the variability of the growth processes in ancient societies. They therefore classically serve to establish demographic estimators (including life expectancy at birth) of ancient populations, supposed to reflect their demographic dynamic.

In view of this, the objective of this project is to produce a more appropriate point of reference (osteological collections from the end of the 19^th century) in the study of ancient populations that made the original methodological developments possible. The demographic implications that follow on from this can subsequently serve to establish indicators that contribute to the knowledge of models of occupation of areas and territories by human populations in the long term. This shows the importance of having available estimators of age for the non-adult cohort of the ancient human populations; estimators that are reliable and adapted to their specific archaeological nature.