The issue of reliability of paleodemographic characteristics is hardly discussed in modern Russian anthropology, although its relevance is beyond doubt as the analysis of age distribution of deaths - based on anthropological data from excavations of city cemeteries of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries - confirms. For comparative analysis, the present study uses official demographic statistics for the second half of the nineteenth century. This analysis revealed that the shape of age distribution of skeletal samples has hardly changed over the period in question. The distribution features a reduced average age of death for adults, a small number of individuals of up to 5 and over 50 years of age, as well as an increased proportion of individuals aged between 20 and 50. In addition, some systematic differences can be seen between the age-at-death distributions of skeletal samples: the proportion of young women is significantly higher, and that of elderly women is lower, compared to the distributions for men and women recorded for the nineteenth century. The discrepancies in the data on the two groups of sources can be accounted for by some independent factors. These include unrepresentative archaeological samples used, differences in the archaeological preservation of skeletons of different age groups, and systematic errors in age estimation. Correcting the age-at-death distribution based on independent anthropological data makes it possible to bring the distribution of skeletal samples closer to the historically recorded one.
