Demographic und morphological of people buried in the cemetery at Dziekanowice, site 2

This study presents an anthropological description of the skeletal material derived from the completely explored early medieval burial ground. In general 46 skeletal burials have been explored. Indications of their sex and age are given in Table 1. Some of the dead people were equipped with iron knives, temporal protections, earthenware pots; a single buck-shot, an iron hatchet and two flints have also been found. The palaeodemographic analysis involves the reconstruction of the death-rate chart, the estimation of the lacking burials of small children, the valuation of opportunities for an increase of the population and natural selection impact, and, at last, the reconstruction of age structure of the living population. This led to the following conclusions (cf Tables 2 - 5). The death-rate in the tested group was high, infant life expectancy was low (e0= 19,3 years), the biological state of the group was close to the lower limit for prehistoric and early-historic populations. The ability to increase the population, was inappreciable (of values Rpot and Ibg in Tables 2 and 4). This implies that the population under investigation was characterized by nearly simple/straight (zero birth-rate). The age structure of the living population consisted of about 20 per cent of small children (up to 5 years old), about 25 per cent of elder children (5 - 14 years old), about 50 per cent of people of productive and reproductive age, and older people over 50 years old constituted barely a few per cent. The sex ratio was approximately 1:1. Table 5 shows the estimates of size of the group using the burial ground (P), and the number of families making up the group (H) at different hypothetical time of cemetery use (T). It is easy to observe that the tested burial ground was used by a small local group probably consisting of a few tens of people who belong to several families. The state of preservation of the skeletal material lying beneath the arable layer was bad: fragments of bones were mainly left at a shallow depth. Individual feasible anthropometric measurements of long bones are shown in Table 6 while those of skulls are presented in Table 8. The height of the bodies of people buried in the burial ground under investigation was at the upper limit of the range observed for the Polish early-medieval series (Table 7), but scantiness of the material from which data concerning the population height are obtained calls for caution in interpreting the results. The anthropometric data about the skull size were compared first of all with suitable craniometric data for people buried in Ostrów Lednicki island (10- 14th centuries). Both the listing of average measures (Table 9) and the calculation of Penrose’s (Table 10) and Mahalanobis’s (Table 11) distance suggest that the population under examination differed in skull morphology from the people buried Ostrów Lednicki island lying less than 2 km away. This conclusion is confirmed by comparison between Mahalanobis’s distance from the series under investigation to that at Ostrów Lednicki and a set of several tens of the same early-medieval series from the whole region of Middle Europe. The order of similarities and differences for the two series is different. The scantiness of the craniometrics evidence from the burial ground under investigation and its state of preservation do not allow far-reaching conclusions to be drawn. It may only be suggested that the established dissimilarity between bits of evidence derived from the burial grounds lying so close to one another is a result of a chronological difference: the 11th century in relation to the 10 – 14th centuries