| Summary: | Older people have been very much ignored in archaeological contexts and part of the reason for that has been the inability to identify them with the methods of classic paleodemographic analysis. The maximum life span often equated with the low life expectancy at birth. The latter equated itself with longevity, although it does not depend solely on biological capacities, but also environmental factors and mortality regimes. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the problems of denying older people in archeology, through a brief insight into the quantifiers of human longevity, and the way in which the classic methods for determining the age of skeletons of adult individuals underestimate the experience of a deep age.
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