Demography beyond typology : revisualising death and data

With the digital recording of early medieval burial complexes in England now very advanced, this essay argues that such
data can be harnessed to address broader questions about the communities represented. Taking an explicitly demographic approach, as proposed here, gives us a way of moving beyond some of the taxonomic concerns that still largely dominate the subject. We present a selection of methods aimed at profiling burial communities, with a view to understanding populations, their distributions, in-group composition, health, and group and individual biographies. This essay then describes some of the advantages of integrating cultural and bioarchaeological evidence to enable us to think about demographic information at different scales.