Dental Evidence for Structural Resilience and Vulnerability at Ancient Copan, Honduras

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Late Classic Copan was a densely populated, socially complex center of ancient Maya political and economic activity. Society was structured around status, residences, and complex demonstrations of identity and lived experiences. Despite these multiplicitous variations in social positions, previous analyses have found high rates of nonspecific stress indicators across all demographic groups at the site. Bioarchaeological research continues to grapple with the relationship between these stress markers and a population’s health. Using micro and macroscopic approaches, this paper investigates differences in the timing, duration, and severity of linear enamel hypoplasias among individuals interned at Copan. By examining the changes in individual stress responses across successive stress episodes, long-term, embodied effects of stress exposure during childhood are explored. The frameworks of structural vulnerability and resilience are applied to interrogate how social positionality, as reflected in death, affected how individuals living in similar physical environments differentially encountered and responded to challenges to their health. ***This presentation will include images of Mesoamerican human remains.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53973