Growing up Gravettian: Bioarchaeological perspectives on adolescence in the European Mid-Upper Paleolithic

French, Jennifer C ORCID: 0000-0001-5947-6669 and Nowell, April (2022) Growing up Gravettian: Bioarchaeological perspectives on adolescence in the European Mid-Upper Paleolithic. JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, 67. p. 101430.

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Abstract

Adolescence is a stage of development unique to the human life course, during which key social, physical, and cognitive milestones are reached. Nonetheless, both the experience of adolescence and the role(s) of adolescents in the past have received little scholarly attention. Here we combine a broad interpretative framework for adolescence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers with direct bioarchaeological (burial) data to examine the lives of teenagers in the European Mid-Upper Paleolithic or Gravettian (∼35–25,000 years ago). Comparisons of the burial practices of individuals of different age classes (infant, child, adolescent, adult), as well as between adolescents who died at different ages, reveal some patterns related to adolescence in these communities, including 1) fewer distinctions based on sex among adolescents compared to adults; 2) differences between the sexes in age-at-death within our ‘adolescent’ age class—with females disproportionally dying later—potentially indicating high risks associated with first pregnancy; 3) distinctions in grave goods and diet among adolescents of different ages-at-death which we tentatively interpret as providing an emic perspective on the beginning of adolescence as defined by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Nonetheless, our analysis supports long-standing models of a distinct, continent-wide European Mid-Upper Paleolithic funerary tradition, with the burial data expressing social cohesion, rather than social distinctions, between age classes.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Adolescence, Upper Paleolithic, Gravettian, Hunter-gatherer, Burial, Grave goods, Social organization, Personal Adornment, Ochre, Social complexity
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	18 May 2022 09:55
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 21:01
DOI:	10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101430
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3155022