Dr. T. Tóth szerk.: Paleoanthropological studies (Anthropologia Hungarica 8/1-2. Budapest, 1968)

The other demographic characteristic of the population was the disproportionately great number of Maturus dead. As demonstrated by Figure 1, the mortality frequency of adults gradually rises from the minimum of those 20-24 years old to the maximum of those 50-54 years old, then it steeply declines. There was found no one older than 70 years among the dead. ,In an attempt to find the causes of this peculiar age distribution, I have examined the age group frequencies of Borne populations in the Central Danubian Basin (Table 3). The series originated from the period extending from the Roman Period till the Hungarian Middle Ages. Por the cession of the unpublished data referring to the Roman Period cemetery at Keszthely-Dobogó (III-IT c. A.D.), I am indebted to Dr. GY.ACSÁDI and to Dr. J.

NEMESKÉRI. According to their origin, I have relegated the selected populations into two kinds of settlement groups.Into the first belong those which are „natural" populations, that is, stationary ones of normal composition. The other group comprises the so-called „settled" populations, their origin due to some strategical cause. As observable from Table 3, the age group composition of the two kinds of populations is characteristically different. In natural populations

,the number of infant and juvenile dead is generally the highest one,, whereas this holds for the adult individuals in the settled populations, as was already shown by ACSÍDI-HARSÁNYINEMESKÉRI (1962) in the analysis of the cemeteries at Zalavár. According to the data submitted, the age group distribution of the population at Majs ÍB similar to that of the ,,settled" communities

,hence it is not impossible that its origin had also been similar to those. Since, however, the major part of the cemetery had been destroyed and the number of excavated graves is meagre, this assumption is not unconditional. On the other hand, it seems to be substantiated also by the archeological data, since the sparsely inhabited community, in the third century, was reinforced by the settling of a further group at the beginning of the fourth century (oral communication of A.BURGER). The analysis of metrical characters revealed significant differences between the males and females concerning the standard deviations of the cranial measurements. In Table 4, the variability of the male skulls have been analysed,following HOWELLS's method (1941), as related to van BORK-PELTKAMP

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s (1950) and HOWELLS's (1941) mean sigmas. As shown on Table 4, the male standard deviations of Majs are very high with respect to the mean sigma,and especially so in the measurements of the brain case. 2 According to the X test,of the 11 measurements of the brain case a significantly high sigma ratio is found in 7 cases (63,6 $).0f the 13 measurements of the facial skeleton, the sigma ratio of 8 measurements is larger than the mean sigma, but only one of them is significant. There are some measurements among these latter, however, whose variability is considerably, or almost significantly, below the mean sigma. Such are the bimaxillar breadth, the height of the upper face and of the orbita. All this goes to show that the males of Majs have been of a highly heterogeneous composition but showing, as a majority, type elements some details of whose construction of the facial skeleton were similar to each other. The female standard deviations cannot be analysed by a similar method, since