Theme:
4. People of the Present – Peopling the Past
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
The Imprint of Weaning: New Methods to Approach Early Life Nutritional Conditions
Content:
Infant feeding practices influence short and long-term health outcomes and survival at later stages of life. Central to early life development lies breastfeeding and weaning which have profound consequences on demography, health status and disease for mothers and children. As biological mechanisms, they monitor infant health and are firmly rooted in human physiology. As culturized activities, are influenced by cultural, ethnic, and societal values, ideas and beliefs.
Understanding the choices behind the upbringing of children in ancient societies is of paramount importance in bioarchaeological research. The innovations that have emerged in bioarchaeological methods have provided the unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct early life nutritional conditions of the past. These findings have evoked ideas of life history theory and the developmental origins of health.
The objective of this session is to enhance our understanding of weaning behavior in past societies from osteological, paleopathological, bio-archaeological, demographic, and genetic perspectives. We intend to explore multi-tissue and multi-disciplinary approaches (stable isotopes, histology, aDNA) new applications/tools and machine learning implementations to reconstruct ancient weaning practices. With this premise in mind, we welcome papers that represent the whole breadth of research areas and uncover the blueprint of infant feeding practices in past societies in the light of the constantly evolving methods from analytical and computational techniques.
Keywords:
breastfeeding practices, weaning stress, palaeodiet, infancy, childhood, growth and development, isotopes aDNA histology
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Christina Papageorgopoulou (Greece) 1
Co-organisers:
Sofija Stefanovic (Serbia) 2
Affiliations:
1. Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace
2. Laboratory of Bioarchaeology, Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Philosophy – University of Belgrade
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