Childness, Humanness, and Violence among the Precolonial Maya

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.

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 that were not without risk of injury or even death. While some children were cultivated into human adulthood, others were selected for premature death as evidenced by sculptural and painted imagery, as well as archaeologically recovered human remains. This paper reflects on the role of violence in making humans out of some children, but not others, while also considering when children themselves became violent actors.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37833.0