Rythm of Youth: Childhood in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Liguria

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.

This paper presents a synthesis of recent research that illuminates the reality of forager childhoods at several sites dated to the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene in the region of Liguria (NW Italy). Indeed, recently published data from the sites of Arma di Nasino, Arma Veirana, Caverna delle Arene Candide and Grotta della Bàsura not only underscore the role and place of children in prehistoric societies at the time, they also reveal how children may have contributed to creating the archaeological record, with concomitant implications for its interpretation. Furthermore, life history and funerary data from several individuals from these sites also permit a discussion of how the last hunter-gatherers of the region partly organized their lifeways around the reality of caring for and moving children across this rugged landscape. This shows that far from being afterthoughts in these groups’ organization, children were central considerations in as well as active agents in it.

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): 39668.0