Puberty in Precontact Illinois: An Evaluation of Pubertal Timing in Middle and Late Woodland Native American Adolescents

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The timing of life-cycle stages in ancient populations has important implications for population dynamics and social identity; it may also serve as an indicator of broader health and social processes. This study of Woodland adolescents is the first assessment of pubertal development in precontact Native Americans and demonstrates that Shapland and Lewis’s composite pubertal stage estimation method can be applied to non-European archaeological remains. I evaluated pubertal timing in 52 individuals from two Middle Woodland (200 BCE500 CE) and two Late Woodland (500–1,000 CE) archaeological sites in West-Central Illinois using the method developed by Shapland and Lewis (2013) and finalized by Lewis et al. (2016). Compared to modern clinical guides, Woodland adolescents began puberty at the expected age (around 10 years old) but experienced late pubertal stunting. This stunting was pronounced in females, with the start of menarches occurring around 17 years old. The Woodland pubertal timing is analogous to what Shapland and Lewis (2016) observed in their sample of Medieval English populations suggesting that pubertal timing in both regions differed in similar ways from industrial societies as a result of forces such as malnutrition and disease on pubescent individuals.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32786