Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 88. (Budapest 1996)

Ubelaker, D. H. ; Pap, I.: Health profiles of a Bronze Age population from northeastern Hungary

years. A young adult at age 15 could expect to live 17.04 years or until about the age of 32. Relatively few persons lived beyond 50 years, with maximum age estimated at about 65 years. Details on life table construction are available by ACSÁDI & NEMESKÉRI (1970) and UBELAKER (1989). Figure 2 presents the mortality data of Table 1 in the form of a mortality curve. This curve documents relatively high infant mortality during the first five years of life, low mortality during the childhood years between 5 and 20 and then a maximum adult death rate between 25 and 30. The curve is somewhat unusual in that the mortality figure for the first year is lower than that between ages 1 and 5. This could reflect postmortem preservation factors. The sex difference of 169 males and 176 females is small, suggesting that both sexes were evenly represented in the sample. Note that 71 adults were so incomplete or fragmentary that sex could not be estimated reliably. No attempt was made to estimate the sex of immature individuals since until maturity, sex differences are not sufficiently pronounced in the skeleton to allow accurate prediction. Dental hypoplasia Evidence of enamel defects largely consisted of linear enamel hypoplasia (Fig. 3). Such defects were found in 19 of 3805 permanent teeth, for an overall very low frequency of 0.5%. Lesions occurred in 8 of 1858 maxillary teeth (0.43%) and 11 of 1947 mandibular teeth (0.57%). The lesions were found in maxillary right first premolars (2.4 %), maxillary right canines (1.7%), maxillary right lateral incisors (0.8%), maxillary left canines (1.9%), mandibular right second premolars (0.74%), mandibular right first premolars (0.7%), mandibular right canines (0.9%), mandibular left lateral incisors (1.0%), mandibular left canines (1.9%), mandibular left first premolars (1.6%), mandibular left second premolars (0.7%), mandibular left first molars (0.6%), and mandibular left second molars (0.7%) (Table 2). dX 20 T 60-64 Age in years Fig. 2. Mortality curve reconstructed from the Tiszafüred sample