Life and Death: How Infant Burial Practices in Buen Suceso Reflect Social Practices, Status, and Community

Summary

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

Infant burials during the Ecuadorian Formative (3800 BC - 1450 BC) took several forms, including as offering deposits at ritual locations, as burials accompanying adults, and as primary burials in cemetery contexts.This variation may reflect important differences in the status of these infants, their life experiences, and/or how Formative peoples viewed infancy. In this poster, we present infant burials from Buen Suceso, a Formative site on the central Ecuadorian coast. Here, infants were buried in public spaces, in domestic/utilitarian structures, and in a formal cemetery. We compare mortuary goods, burial style and examine skeletal evidence of pathology and trauma for these individuals. Different burial locations and styles may reflect emergent ranked status, based on the distribution of pathological lesions. However, infants buried in the cemetery were more likely to be associated with ceramics, figurines, and shells, items that held significance for the Buen Suceso community. Thus, the connections between early life experiences of health, special grave goods, and burial location do not clearly depict emergent ascribed status. In this poster, we showcase how infant remains can reflect nuances in community structure and may have also been treated differently from adults as part of a larger ritual practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39027.0