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In the past decades, ethnographic documents produced in the Sixteenth Century illustrating iconographic representations of the body have been consolidated as an important source of information to explore gender identity in Mesoamerican archaeology. Because these documents were published with explanations provided by the Spanish friars, the presupposition in the interpretation of these sources has ignored agency in both female and elderly status. Therefore, the differences between genders in the representations have been analysed by the archaeologists through stereotypical gender-specific elements in the construction of the appearance of the body, and they neglect mixed-gender attributions as in the case of aged bodies. These mixed-gender attributions of ageing open up the consideration of questioning Colonialism cultural assumptions about how gender and ageing intersects within the mortuary context in complex societies, when the predominance of the use of these sources is given to justify social inequality by gender and age. The goal of this paper is to study gender dimensions of ageing through the analysis of the household burials at the site of Monte Alban (500 BC-AD 1250), which was the center of a state-level society in the Oaxaca Valley during at least AD 200-850. Aged bodies were selected considering pathologies and markers of senescence, such as joint diseases, osteoporosis, traces of wear and tooth loss (n=39; 11,8%). There were no distinction between adornments and objects in the burials that could be specific by male (n=20) or female (n=19) sexed bodies. In addition, the funerary practices suggest that seniors were engaged in occupational specializations of the household and these were not gendered-specific, as ceramic production and trade of prestige goods. On the other hand, gendered processes took place in the mortuary ritual to distinguish some symbolical aspects of longevity to preserve the ancestral memory of the house.

EAA 2018: Abstract

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