Final answer:
To determine the age-at-death of a skeleton, researchers use morphological observations of the skeleton in conjunction with methods like transition analysis, which uses Bayes's theorem to estimate age. Traditional methods can be biased towards younger ages, hence transition analysis uses known-age data and informative priors to reduce this bias.
Step-by-step explanation:
To determine the age-at-death of a skeleton, researchers utilize several methods depending on whether the individual is an adult or a child. In adults, this is often done by observing the morphology of parts of the skeleton, such as the pubic symphysis, iliac auricular surface, and cranial suture closure. In contrast, the age of individuals younger than twenty is estimated using dental development and the fusion of growth plates in bones, known as epiphyseal fusion.
Traditional methods of adult age estimation which involve stages based on skeletal morphology often have a bias toward younger ages due to reference samples comprising predominantly younger individuals. These methods struggle to distinguish between older adults, leading to broad age intervals such as "fifty years or older." An alternative method that helps combat this bias is transition analysis, which applies Bayes's theorem and maximum likelihood estimates to known-age reference sample data to estimate the probability of an individual's age at death.
Transition analysis also enables researchers to use both informative priors based on documentary data and uniform priors, thus helping to avoid the issue of 'age mimicry' where the age distribution from the reference sample overshadows the real age distribution of the cemetery sample. This is crucial for understanding mortality profiles and the impacts of diseases and aging on populations.