The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence

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.