The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
In the last 30 years, the archaeology of childhood and adolescence has gained traction to become an effervescent part of the broader discipline of archaeology. Childhood is a crucial period of life in which identity is formed as a dialogic process of social, environmental, material, spiritual, and cultural entanglements. This session examines embodied perspectives of children and/or adolescent experiences in archaeology, recognizing the body as a key site for ways of becoming, social practices, rites of passage, and cultural transmission and its reworkings. In line with many earlier studies of childhood in the past, this session is multidisciplinary in nature, combining biological and social approaches. It is also rooted in critical, reflexive approaches to social lives in antiquity. In particular, it seeks to emphasize the diversity, temporality, and intersectionality of the making of social persons in the past that considers the dynamics of sex, gender, kinship, community affiliations, and, of course, age.
Other Keywords
Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis •
Gender and Childhood •
Mortuary Analysis •
Maya: Classic •
Mortuary archaeology •
childhood •
Andes: Middle Horizon •
Archaeology •
Colonialism •
Ornament
Geographic Keywords
United Mexican States (Country) •
Belize (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
Kingdom of Sweden (Country) •
Kingdom of Norway (Country) •
Isle of Man (Country) •
Faroe Islands (Country) •
Republic of Panama (Country) •
Republic of Colombia (Country) •
Netherlands Antilles (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)
- Documents (11)
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Canaries in the Coal Mine: How Children Reveal the Embodied Realities of Colonialism (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Childhood is paradoxically the most precarious yet vital period of a person’s life. It is when children form their biological and social self, embodying everything around them. However, what surrounds them may not be safe, stable, or congruent with a healthy, long life....
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Childhood in the Wari World: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Dietary Patterns in a Middle Horizon (600–1000 CE) Community (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper uses an anthropological bioarchaeological approach to examine stable isotope data to reconstruct juvenile diet and migration. Through the analysis of stable carbon and oxygen isotope data from dental enamel carbonates, this study builds a preliminary...
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Childness, Humanness, and Violence among the Precolonial Maya (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past decade or so, bioarchaeologists working in the Maya area have called attention to how permanent alterations of the body transformed immature bodies into fully realized humans. Among these alterations were cranial and dental modification, painful practices...
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The Impacts of Absence and Displacement on Viking Age Childhood (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Childhood as a part of social and cultural frameworks is varied and fluid, and the space afforded to and occupied by children will vary in multiple ways according to intersecting lines of social identity. The Viking Age is generally recognized as a period of profound...
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An Osteobiography of Tomb Op. 42, Ent. 5 from Copán, Honduras (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research constructs an osteobiological narrative of two females and a male from Copán, Honduras, who were placed together within a Classic period (AD 600–822) tomb in the residential group Salamar (8L-10) Op. 42. Utilizing mortuary and isotopic data, this case study...
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Precious People: Indigenous Medical-Spiritual Relations in the Archaeology of Maya Childhood (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous studies of bodily ornaments from burial contexts have often fixated on notions of wealth, social inequality, and prestige. Although we consider analyses focused on economic wealth, we turn, in particular, to Indigenous and ladino (mestizo) medical-spiritual...
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Producing and Stretching Identity: Earspools and Childhood in the Maya Area (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Iconographic sources indicate that the wearing of earspools by ancient Maya peoples was so ubiquitous that it was an essential part of personhood, a status put into jeopardy when earspools were removed and replaced with paper in scenes of almost naked captives or of...
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The Question of Permanence: Understanding Head Shaping as a Process (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent conversations about body modification demonstrate that alterations to human form are experiential and are not solely oriented towards a final product. In thinking of prehistoric head shaping practices—practices engaged in with the bodies of infants—archaeological...
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Rythm of Youth: Childhood in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Liguria (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a synthesis of recent research that illuminates the reality of forager childhoods at several sites dated to the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene in the region of Liguria (NW Italy). Indeed, recently published data from the sites of Arma di...
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The Secret Lives of Paleolithic Teens: Puberty Assessment of Adolescents in the European Upper Paleolithic (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, archaeologists have made real progress in understanding the lived lives of Paleolithic children, but adolescents from this period remain understudied. In this study, we use maturational markers developed on the skeletons of medieval English children to...
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The Tiniest Burials: Fetal Burial and Personhood During the Late Roman Period in Egypt (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mortuary practices surrounding fetal-aged individuals are highly variable, providing opportunities for examining complex beliefs about personhood, social identity, and “wholeness” from cross-cultural and chronological perspectives. This paper examines the mortuary context...