Estimating trauma prevalence from incompletely preserved human skeletal samples: A comparison of two approaches
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1The prevalence of trauma in human skeletal samples – and its comparison across samples through time and space – is commonly used in bioarchaeological research to reconstruct population-specific social, cultural, and environmental life realities. With decreasing skeletal completeness, however, trauma prevalence estimates become increasingly uncertain because once-present trauma may not be preserved in the archaeological record. Therefore, skeletal remains in a sample are typically restricted to a predefined minimum level of completeness before analysis. However, how this common practice affects trauma prevalence estimates remains unexplored. In this study, we evaluated the performance of two approaches for estimating trauma prevalence from incompletely preserved skeletal samples: the conventional approach based on crude trauma frequencies (CFs), considering only specimens with ≥75% completeness, and a recently proposed alternative approach, generalized linear models (GLMs), factoring in specimen completeness. Using a simulation framework, we assessed how closely CF- and GLM-based trauma prevalence estimates matched the known trauma prevalence of two once-complete cranial samples, after we introduced increasing amounts of missing data (resulting in samples that are about 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% incomplete). Our simulated datasets incorporated empirical data on cranial fracture patterns from real-life clinical and forensic trauma cases alongside patterns of varying skeletal completeness derived from Upper Paleolithic samples. Our results show that GLM estimates were consistently more precise than CFs across all tested incompleteness levels (20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% incomplete). As skeletal preservation decreased, CFs – unlike GLMs – increasingly often yielded incorrect reversed relative trauma prevalence patterns between samples, provided incorrect estimates of 0% prevalence, and occasionally failed to produce estimates. Owing to its superior performance and analytical versatility, we recommend using the GLM approach and its extensions over the CF approach for analyzing trauma prevalence in archaeological skeletal samples, especially when dealing with largely incomplete samples.
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Judith Beier, Matteo Santon et Hannes Rathmann, « Estimating trauma prevalence from incompletely preserved human skeletal samples: A comparison of two approaches », Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris [En ligne], 38(S) | 2026, mis en ligne le 16 décembre 2025, consulté le 08 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/16682 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15hhb
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