The Marking of Age in Ancient Coastal Oaxaca

Abstract

Research on gender by feminist anthropologists during the last two decades has inspired recent theoretical and methodological work on the subject of crosscutting social identities and "intersectionality" (Moore 1993; Collins 1999; Meskell 2001). Of particular interest is how social identities differentiate individuals and groups of people, as well as how varied identities can overlap and intersect based on age, sex/gender, class, ethnic affiliation, and sexuality (Meskell 1998). As a result, archaeologists have begun to consider age-based identities in addition to social identities based on gender or status alone (see also Sofaer Derevenski 1994a, 2000; Lillehammer 1989; Moore and Scott 1997; Scott 1999; Kamp 2001). To do so, it is necessary to recognize the disjuncture between skeletal age (infants, juveniles, sub-adults, and adults) and cultural categories (children, adults), much in the same way sex and gender are separate (Sofaer Derevenski 1994b:8-10). In many circumstances, gender itself is an age-dependent category (Gilchrist 1997; Lesick 1997:35; Lucy 1997:154; R. Joyce 2000a). Thus, recent work has sought to define childhood and adulthood (and all age-based social differences) based on emic categories using archaeological evidence specific to the culture being studied so as to develop local "cultural theories on ageing" (Lillehammer 2000:24).