Pubertal Development among Pre-Hispanic Moquegua Valley Populations (Southern Peru, 800-1500 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As a temporally bounded bio-social process, puberty offers a compelling topic to explore the lived experiences of past people. The onset and pace of pubertal development are shaped by nutritional, environmental, and social factors that reflect long and short-term childhood experiences. We investigate puberty as a flexible process shaped by multiple factors; specifically, how in the late pre-Hispanic Andes (800-1500 CE) adolescent growth and development interacted with childhood health and environmental conditions. We present data on 217 individuals, 5-30 years old, from three skeletal collections recovered in the Moquegua Valley (southern Peru): Omo M10, Chen Chen M1, and Estuquiña M6. We establish and compare pubertal growth/development curves across Andean and global samples and investigate the long-term effects of stress on the life course. This research combines traditional osteological methods for estimating age-at-death, sex, and stature with recent methodologies for assessing pubertal growth and determining juvenile sex. The scope of our analysis allows for the reconstruction and comparison of early life course histories, and the opportunity to evaluate how physical and psychosocial stress affected puberty in the pre-Hispanic Andes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39365.0