The Question of Permanence: Understanding Head Shaping as a Process

Summary

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 perspectives are frequently necessarily focused on the marks of the practice on the adults. In contrast, placing attention on the process of head shaping as part of the acts of child-rearing moves discussion into a consideration of infancy, parenthood, and the actions that inform what is deemed proper child-rearing. Shifting focus from an archaeologically visible aesthetic to one that is structured around the appropriate ways to treat an infant moves the discussion away from a focus on the practice as inherently having an end goal of permanence. To that end, here I consider approaches to permanence from architecture and art history to shape our understanding of the body as a dynamic thing. I present a broad appraisal of cranial vault modification from ~1,700 individuals who lived in northern Chile before the colonial era, arguing that perhaps permanence is a modern fixation, and that final shape may not have been what was important for the people who bound their child’s head.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Marking and Making of Social Persons: Embodied Understandings in the Archaeologies of Childhood and Adolescence   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38454.0