The Secret Lives of Paleolithic Teens: Puberty Assessment of Adolescents in the European Upper Paleolithic

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.

In recent years, archaeologists have made real progress in understanding the lived lives of Paleolithic children, but adolescents from this period remain understudied. In this study, we use maturational markers developed on the skeletons of medieval English children to determine puberty status of 10 Upper Paleolithic adolescents from sites in Russia, the Czech Republic, Monaco, Italy and France. With these data we address the following 3 questions: (1) Did these individuals look like children or emerging adults when they died and did that affect the way they were treated in death? (2) Was adolescence recognized as a special time in the life course of an individual in the Upper Paleolithic? (3) At what age was a child considered to be an adult in the Upper Paleolithic? Did this vary by sex, geographic region and/or time period? We combine our puberty data with paleopathological assessments, aDNA information on sex and genetic relatedness, ethnographic data, material culture (grave goods), and other behavioral evidence to develop for the first time a picture of the lives of European Upper Paleolithic teens.

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): 37804.0