IMPACT OF MIGRATIONS ON PALEODEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RUSSIAN POPULATION, 17th TO 19th CENTURIES

The article presents an evaluation of paleodemographic characteristics of the Russian population in the modern period and assesses migration as a possible factor that contributed to them. Analysis is made on 64 skeletal series from excavations of 17th-19th century urban cemeteries. It is shown that Siberian samples differ from European Russia samples in that they feature a significantly higher proportion of children and a relatively low proportion of adults. In general, the identified differences tend to match the differences between the samples collected on 'early settlers' and so-called 'old-timers', irrespective of territory of residence. One of the main explanations for the specific age-at-death distribution found in Siberians is seen to lie in the distinctive migrant age-sex distribution and in the high rates of population growth east of the Urals. Significant discrepancies are found between life expectancy estimates based on paleodemographic values of the juvenility index and on nineteenth century official statistics. These are most likely to be due to the discrepancies between the age-at-death distributions for rural and urban population, as well as to the insufficient representativeness of the skeletal series. It is shown that the average percentage of working age people is higher in samples from military and industrial settlements than in rural population groups. This can be explained by both differences in the age-sex composition of the population and relatively high mortality rates in some age groups in the two aforementioned types of settlements.