Sub-Adult Identity: Attitudes towards Childhood Viewed from Mortuary Settings in Neolithic and Bronze Age Thailand

Abstract

The examination of sub-adults from prehistoric populations is a recent development in archaeology. Before the rise of gender archaeology in the 1980s, children were associated with women and were peripheral or invisible figures in the archaeological discipline. From the 1990s a growing body of research focussed on children in prehistory has emerged in Europe, America and South America. This research has provided tremendous insight into the social, economic and ritual significance of children in prehistory. Unfortunately, similar research strategies examining the significance of children in prehistoric communities in Southeast Asia has not occurred with similar vigour.

This thesis aims to understand the attitude of adults towards sub-adults in mortuary settings and to understand the significance of sub-adults in the social, economic and ritual elements of their communities. Finally, this study examines if similar behaviours were exhibited across the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in mainland Southeast Asia.

Cemeteries from the Neolithic site of Khok Phanom Di and the Bronze Age sites of Ban Lum Khao and Non Nok Tha in modern Thailand were examined to compare the burial treatment of sub-adults in relation to adults using spatial and burial information, material culture and health variables.

Mortuary evidence from Khok Phanom Di suggests that infants were exposed to differential burial treatment. It is suggested that infants were not afforded full membership of this community while children older than one year of age were more frequently exposed to normative burial treatment. Finally, it is suggested the transition from childhood to adulthood at Khok Phanom Di occurred for individuals aged 10 to 14 years of age. Greater homogeneity of mortuary behaviour is exhibited between sub-adults and adults in the Bronze Age, suggesting that the status of all children, including infants, had changed since the Neolithic. Changing mortality patterns for infants between the Neolithic and Bronze Ages may explain differential mortuary patterns observed in sub-adult cemetery populations. Show more