Children at the Heart of Buen Suceso

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Children in antiquity provide bioarchaeologists with a window into the past as they embody the environment and culture around them (Halcrow and Tayles 2011). Due to subadults’ sensitivity to biocultural factors, they are excellent indicators of the health and nutrition of a society (Beauchesne and Agarwal 2019). In South America, the death of children and infants was marked as a special event by the conversion of these individuals into symbolic ancestors, and their burial at significant locations often created and reinforced community identity (Moseley 2010). At Buen Suceso, the only skeletons recovered were subadults. To date, the remains of 10 subadults have been excavated from the structure and the plaza areas of the site. Given the auspicious location of these burials and the ubiquity of subadult remains, this paper will discuss both the symbolism of interment of children at special locations and what subadult remains at Buen Suceso can tell us about the social organization and health of the community through the evaluation of signs of skeletal stress, such as linear enamel hypoplasia, cribra orbitalia, and periosteal new bone formation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36863.0