Standard Life Tables for Western and Southern Europe from Antiquity to the Black Death

The purpose of this study is to infer the mortality regimes from human remains found in cemeteries excavated between Antiquity and the Black Death in 1347-49. We suggest a method to (1) move from the age distribution of deaths of a single cemetery to its death probability profile; (2) build Standard Life Tables (SLT) directly deduced from European necropolis, which can be used as terms of comparison with respect to other necropolises or group of necropolises. The SLT are constructed using 75 cemeteries (17,107 individuals), excavated in a vast region of Western and Southern Europe, that guarantee a trustable group of deaths by age. Life expectancy at five years varies from 27.2 (first quartile) to 38.8 (third quartile), with e5=32.8 for the median table. By comparing our SLT with other tables extrapolated for antiquity, we show that skeletal data can offer trustable information on European mortality from antiquity to the Black Death.