Children at the Heart of Buen Suceso: Bioarchaeological Analysis of Subadult Remains

Abstract

Children in antiquity provide bioarchaeologists with a window into the past, as they embody the environment and culture around them (Halcrow and Tayles, 2011). Due to subadults’ sensitivity to biocultural factors, they are excellent indicators of the health and nutrition of a society (Beauchesne and Agarwal, 2019). At Buen Suceso, a Valdivia-era village occupied from 3750-1425 BC, the only skeletons recovered were subadult and young adults. To date, the remains of 15 semi-complete and isolated subadult and young adult remains have been excavated from various structures around the site. Given the auspicious location of these burials and the ubiquity of subadult remains, this article will discuss both the symbolism of interment of children at special locations and what subadult remains at Buen Suceso can tell us about the social organization and health of the community through the evaluation of signs of skeletal stress, such as linear enamel hypoplasia, periosteal new bone formation, and porotic hyperostosis. The presence of the above pathologies and the lack of severity amongst the population indicates that these individuals likely suffered from low-grade levels of stress over time, which could be the result of increasing sedentism and aggregation (Kent, 1986; Zeidler and Ubelaker, 2021). The types of pathology present and the frequency of the pathologies across this sample could also indicat some form of alternative power, such as heterarchy or anarchy, in which unranked or no central power system is in place. Thus, the subadult remains at the Buen Suceso site offer an additional insight into life in the Formative Period, as the community may have been intentionally placing children in communal structures as an offering or as a symbol of care, in which alternative forms of power may be at play.