Theme:
4. People of the Present – Peopling the Past
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
It Takes a Village: Interdisciplinary Bioarchaeological Research on the Role of Children in the Past
Content:
In the last decades, the advances of the so-called Third Science Revolution in Archaeology have brought forth numerous studies which provided a new understanding of how people lived in the past. Continued technological improvements and an increased effort to integrate the different methods derived from the natural sciences with a careful archaeological contextualization shifted the focus from broader questions of human mobility and cultural transitions towards high-resolution studies of the local connectedness of people within one group or between groups.
The development of methodologies to detect fine-grained genetic relatedness has given new impetus to the study of kinship, supplementing information on biological aspects to come to a holistic interpretation of how social belonging was constructed by past communities and shaped their social dynamics and organisation. In bioarchaeological investigations into the sociobiological and demographic characteristics of past societies, children have often received special attention as research on the communities’ youngest members allows scientists insights, e.g into the past communities’ health status, (breast)-feeding practices and diet, post-marital residence patterns, as well as kinship ties. Moreover, rather than just being considered unformed adults, their life stage might situate children within specific roles in their community, which can be further modulated by gender, status, health and geographic or ancestral origin.
We invite papers that examine the role(s) children occupied within their communities and wider society which can be indirectly inferred through burial treatment, cross-sectional and incremental stable isotope analysis, biological relatedness, individual mobility, pathologies, etc. through a variety of disciplines. Contributions covering any time period or geographic region are welcome, but we encourage studies that take an interdisciplinary lens to questions of childhood in the past and specifically interrogate the attitudes towards and treatment of children within communities of defined archaeological cultures, and contrast and compare these between life stages and cultures.
Keywords:
motherhood, interdisciplinary, ancient DNA, stable isotope analysis, social structure, children diet
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:
Tina Saupe (Estonia) 1
Co-organisers:
Francesca Fulminante (United Kingdom) 2,3,4,5
Alissa Mittnik (Germany) 6
Alessandra Morrone (Estonia) 7
Affiliations:
1. Estonian Biocentre, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
2. Bristol University, Bristol, UK
3. Oxford University, Oxford, UK
4. University Roma Tre, Rome, Italy
5. Hanse-WissenschaftsKolleg 2022-23, Delmenhorst, Germany
6. Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany)
7. Institute of History and Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
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