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mortAAR

With mortAAR you can calculate a life table based on archaeological demographic data. You just need the number of people of a certain age, but you can also use single individual data. mortAAR allows to separate the data according to sex/location/epoch or any other grouping variable.

What is a life table [aka discrete time survival analysis]? According to Chamberlain it is a

“(…) mathematical device for representing the mortality experience of a population and for exploring the effects on survivorship of age-specific probabilities of death. One reason why life tables have been ubiquitous in demography is that mortality cannot easily be modelled as a single equation or continuous function of age.”

To our knowledge as of writing, a simple to use and easily accessible tool to calculate and create archaeological life tables has been lacking. That is why we sat down and put mortAAR for R together. We hope it will be of use for archaeologists world-wide.

In our view, mortAAR shines in the following areas:

• Ease and flexibility of input (different kinds of customization and grouping)
• Sophisticated means of computation (exploding of age ranges, separation factor for average lived years)
• Comprehensiveness of output (life tables for all groups specified, plots for the most important measures, relative population calculation)

For further information, please have a look at the Vignettes – Basic usage, Extended discussion, Life table correction and Reproduction – and the Manual.

Installation

mortAAR is available on CRAN and can be installed through install.packages("mortAAR"). You can also install the development version with:

if(!require('remotes')) install.packages('remotes')
remotes::install_github('ISAAKiel/mortAAR', build_vignettes = TRUE)

Licence

mortAAR is released under the GNU General Public Licence, version 3. Comments and feedback are welcome, as are code contributions.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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