Video
Children as Formational Agents in the Archaeological Record: Some Ethnoarchaeological Observation
Transcript
Karen: Now, we're going turn to a different topic, more domestic topic, different part of the world. Pei-Lin Yu is going to talk to us about children as informational agents in the archeological record. I'm going to introduce her, and give an abstract of her talk.
She asks, is it possible to distinguish children's behavior in the archeological record, and what roles do children play as active site formational agents, and what are the implications for archeological investigation? She is looking at ethnoarcheological descriptions of playing, technological behavior, children's use of space, and the role of subsistence in social roles from Neotropical forager/gardeners to develop a frame of reference, and predictive statements about archeological correlates of children's behavior.
We're very lucky to have Pei-Lin here today. She is a cultural specialist for the NPS Rocky Mountains Cooperative Ecosystem study unit. She's an affiliate faculty with the Anthropology Department at the University of Montana, and she's worked in almost every region of the US, as well as Venezuela and China. Welcome today, Pei-Lin. Can you pause for just a minute while I pull up your presentation.
Pei-Lin: All right, so I'm going sort of halfway read this paper. I don't want it to sound too dry, but we are sort of moving from an epic warrior sort of setting to something that's a little bit more of the chaos and frenzy of individual households. Those of you who have children know what I mean.
I wanted to, basically, start off by saying that this is a topic of interest to me. We no longer have hunting and gathering people living in North America, or in any of the areas or territories where the National Park Service stewards archeological resources. Many of the lands which are now controlled by the United States actually did have hunting and gathering peoples to an extent at the time that Euro-Americans came here. I'm thinking that this approach might actually provide some information that would be fun, helpful, useful for archeologists, and also for interpretive and educational folks, to think about reaching out to kids, basically, also to adults who are interested in how kids manage their material world.
Anybody who spends any amount of time with kids - and full disclosure, I don't have any of my own, but I've spent a lot of time with them - can appreciate the intense nature of the way that they interact with the material world, and with their chaotic but patterned use of space. If you watch kids long enough, you're going see that they use space in pretty consistent ways. Archeologists are becoming more and more interested in children, and to date, kids have played a lot of different roles in archeological theory and research problem orientation. Next slide, please.
Kids have been cast in a lot of different roles by archeologists, whether they're sort of little reflectors of adult systems, as we have tended to study mortuary patterning of children's burials, whether they are little beings that are sort of disempowered, marginalized, and invisible because archeologists just haven't really had the interest in trying to find them in any archeological record, more recently, as more calculating decision makers who really are bound by side boards of fitness and optimality in a more evolutionary sense. These are just a few ways in which archeologists have sort of cast children in supporting roles to support various theoretical perspectives. Next slide, please.
These disparate sort of approaches really do converge on some key points, though, which is children are worthy of archeological investigation. They can illuminate aspects of past life ways and systems. That their behavior should be ... You can see it. You can see their behavior in the archeological record, and that children's activities are not just miniature versions of what grown-ups do, but actually are conditioned by some really interesting unique factors. Again, I would say that these are things that might be able to feed into improved interpretation and education of archeological sites by archeologists and educational specialists to reach out to people who are interested in this topic. Next slide.
Today, I'm going address these questions using some observations of hunting and gathering, and gardener children in a Neotropical setting. By which I mean New World tropics. I'm going introduce the Pume people of Venezuela. Next slide.
Technological behavior and use of space will contribute to a frame of reference about expected archeological signatures, but rather than cast kids in a supporting role for any given theoretical position, my goal in this study was basically to let a kid be a kid and watch them as dynamic agents in the formation of the archeological record. The observations that I'm about to share with you, I made in the early 1990s in south central Venezuela, in seasonal camps of the Goroana community of Pume Indians. On this slide we should be seeing a graphic of a map. Is that correct, Karen?
Karen: Sorry, I was on mute. Yes, yes, we are.
Pei-Lin: Perfect, okay. Let's go to the next slide. The Pume live in south central Venezuela near the headwaters of the Orinoco River. There's sort of two modes of life for these folks. They either live in sort of semi-sedentide, or acculturated river communities, or in more traditional mobile groups in the grasslands. During the dry season, there's basically two seasons in this place. The dry season is when, basically, the terrain is free of water, and this is when people can get around a lot, so this is where people do a lot of mobile work. They do a lot of long distance trips for subsistence. They do a lot of visiting and trading. Next slide.
This is should show a dry season village. The Pume move every week or two during the dry season, and live in small family groups right along river drainages where they can access fresh water. Next slide.
Men fish in local ponds and rivers, providing the majority of food by weight during the dry season. Next slide.
Women gather insect larvae, and wild and introduced fruit. Their main focus during the day during the dry season is going out and procuring raw materials for technology, particularly weaving. Next slide.
During the rainy season, flood waters rise and the Pume move up slope. There are a lot of stabilized sand dunes in this area. The clay soil here is called plinth soil. The water table just keeps rising during the rainy season, and you’re basically wading up to your armpits trying to get from dune to dune to go visiting. People don't do as much visiting during this period. The Pume move up slope to these larger multi-family houses during the wet season, the rainy season. Next slide.
Houses are arranged near a dance plaza that's used for night-time ceremonies. Let me tell you guys, you haven't lived until you've partied for about five nights in a row with the Pume. They're a lot of fun. Each house has a kitchen midden, and some of the larger sort of multi-households will come and then form at the edges of camp. Next slide.
During the rainy season, sort of men and women switch roles, and women supply the majority of food by weight. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of wild roots and some wet season fruit. They also do small scale gardening of bitter manioc. Next slide.
Men do hunt during this time of year. This is a really good time to hunt, actually, because the water table is so high that terrestrial mammals and terrestrial reptiles are somewhat constricted in their movements. It's pretty easy to intercept wild game. Here you see a wide variety of wild animals these guys hunt. I don't have a picture of a giant anteater, but those are hunted, as well. Interestingly enough, snakes and monkeys are not on the menu. Although they are everywhere, there are spiritual reasons not to eat them. Next slide.
The Goroana Pume community, at the time of my visit and research, was made up of about 60 people, including 20 children. Pume children are usually born about three or more year intervals, sometimes up to five-years intervals. Babies are nursed all the way up until five years of age. For those of you who have taken basic anthropology classes or nutritional classes, you know that constant lactation can suppress ovulation in women. The long term nursing of babies often spaces births out, which is a very common phenomena among forager women who don't want a whole bunch of toddlers when they're moving around the landscape.
Children stand and walk early compared to our kids. You would be surprised at how active these little guys can be. They're encouraged to walk at very, very early ages. There's almost no crawling stage with Pume children, which is really fascinating to me. Then, we're talking about living in the tropics, where there's spiders, and scorpions, and snakes, and things. They're trying to get children to stand up, move around, and be self-propelling, and out of the range of dangers around things at a very early age.
They begin to eat solid food at about six months, but as I mentioned, they still nurse up until five years of age. One of my favorite images that I have was sitting at a dance next to a friend of mine, whose three year old daughter was nursing and taking turns smoking a cigarette at the same time. It's not an image we often see here in America. Next slide.
In terms of material culture, kind of how kids start interacting with tools, and things like that, girls are given small baskets, and they begin to learn weaving at about three or four years of age. There's a specific palm tree called the moriche palm, which is the primary weaving material for these folks. We prefer as archeologists who don't work with frozen contexts, or anaerobic contexts, or arid contexts, we don't get a chance to fully appreciate the incredible wealth and diversity of woven technology. This, for me, as an ethnoarcheology person was just really exciting. We got to see a lot baskets, mats, twine, all kinds of hammocks being woven out there. These were organic things that normally would not preserve in the archeological record.
Little boys are given itty bitty bows and arrows when they're about one and a half to two years of age. They run around camp shooting at chickens, and dogs, and each other. The interesting thing is that for boys, I saw no manufacture of projectiles or of bows until they were in early adolescence. The boys don't start doing sort of subsistence-type technology until a little bit later in life than little girls. Next slide.
I'm just going start talking about the work of children. Kids today, we have our kids do a lot of homework, and they play a lot of soccer, and they might be doing some chores. In this forager community, kids were working quite a bit. There were a lot of activities, and I'm just going define kids' work in this case as activities that are encouraged or directed by grown-ups. Some special tasks include the tending of infants, food sharing, and clean-up. Infant tending is a real common activity for young girls. I've seen girls as young as four, five years old carrying infants around on their hips. Girls do a lot more of work in camp, overall. Orphan girls do the most work of all, of the children. Typical jobs around the camp would include hauling fresh water, bringing in fire wood, cleaning up around camp, again, sort of infant care, and food distributions, food share-out. Because these activities are commonly performed by adults, I think that they would probably end up getting sort of swamped in the general archeological record of these kinds of activities.
I wanted to talk a little bit about food sharing, because I thought this was fascinating, and because a lot of archeologists have benefited by doing re-fits of animal bones to show sharing among hearth, and other situations. Let's go to the next slide.
Karen, am I still on track here? Do I have a slide with a bunch of dots on it, some red, some white?
Karen: Yes, you're fine.
Pei-Lin: Great, okay. Imagine, you guys, as you're coming home one evening, and you've got both arms full of groceries, and you set them down on your counter. Then you take a deep breath, and you take them back out, you go up and down the street, and you share out all your food to your neighbors. This is what happens when this foraging group brings food home. They immediately distribute it around camp. This is a very common practice with foraging people. Conversely, it was kind of nice, if you didn't go shopping that night, you might have a couple neighbors drop off some bananas or a can of soup for you. There's a lot of sharing going on here. Every time that adults come in to camp, children are dispatched. They go running over to the homes of returning foragers. The next three slides show this process. Next slide.
The children will run to each of the houses where foragers have come home with food, and they'll bring empty vessels with them. Usually little bowls made out of gourds. Next slide.
The children then walk carefully back home with full vessels to share out to their families. Both meat and plant food are shared out, which is kind of unusual. We're used to hearing about foraging folks traditionally sharing out meat, but not plants. In this case, the women also shared out fruit and roots. In fact, sometimes we even saw two levels of share-out, both of a raw food, and then again after the food's been cooked. These kids are running their little legs off doing a lot of sharing behavior.
I would expect archeological traces, again, of sharing usually include things like re-fit the faunal bones, but then there's no guarantee, if you're looking at an archeological site, that that share-out would have been done by children. I just thought it was really interesting because in all of the different communities of this particular ethnic group, it was the children who were doing the share-out if they were available. Next slide.
When the houses or the dance plaza need cleaning, kids may be tasked with removing small sharp debris to avoid foot injuries. On the dance plaza, for example, people dance wildly all night in these dance plazas, and the last thing you want to do is step on a sharp fish bone. Also, because there are a lot babies in camp, that's another reason to remove small objects. Next slide.
Clean areas with unusually few items can manifest archeologically as just basically empty places or voids - areas that you don't really see anything in. Some of you who have excavated in areas that you think were voids, around which there are other materials, might have experienced a question mark in your head. What's going on with voids? I expect there's not a lot of chance to separate children's cleaning activities from adult's cleaning activities, but I did see that children did a lot of cleaning in the Pume camp because they're close to the ground, their eyes are good, and they can spot those small sharp objects. They were often tasked to do very specific cleaning jobs.
Here, I've got a house, an idealized house that shows where you have concentrations of dropped items because people are sitting around the edges of these houses, which are thatched houses with no walls. All the natural light in the house is in a sort of a doughnut shape in the periphery of the house, and the dark central area is where people go to hang their hammocks and sleep at night. The central area is kept spotlessly clean, and the exterior areas have Binford’s drop zones are all around the periphery of the houses. Then for the outdoor hearths and middens, that's where you get a lot of the bigger items. Next slide.
This is a really fun little toy. Toys were really rare. This is a hunter/gatherer community. These folks are moving around very frequently, so kids don't accumulate big chests full of toys like we're used to seeing in our culture. I saw some small dolls. I saw a little whirligig that resembled sort of a bull roarer, some of you may know what a bull roarer is like. I saw this wooden carousel. Very rarely, children were able to get toys obtained through trade that were man manufactured, from either neighboring ranchers or neighboring tribes. Middens most often were sort of the best place for children to go and glean for toys. This was a really interesting thing. I saw a lot of expedient toys being made out of things that could be removed from the middens immediately outside of the household. Again, archeologically I would not expect to see a whole lot of evidence of toys among foraging children. Okay, next slide.
There is not formalized learning for tool making, or material technology of any kind, among the Pume. Like many of you, I'm used to sort of a step one, step two approach to learning things. Like, let's say, I wanted to learn how to knit, I might get a book and go through the steps, or sit down with a friend or a family member and learn how to knit. Pume don't do that. Basically, you are on your own. You watch and you learn, and you have to kind of pick it up on the run. Next slide.
A common activity for little girls is to remove woven items from midden. These are discarded woven items, and carefully take them apart in order to replicate the weaving pattern and figure it out. They also did this with twilled twine. For those of you who know about twilling, that's basically two strands that are curled around into one. I never did observe little boys making tools. I observed them playing a whole bunch with different things, but I never saw them making tools. Here I show a midden, a sort of generalized midden, that has discarded objects, some of which are just cruddy things, like old bones and things that nobody could do anything with. There are some that might have a little bit of usefulness, or prettiness left in them. Then the pink dots are the items that would be of high interest to kids who are going into the midden looking for things that they can either play with, or learn from, or both. Next slide.
I would expect that the only archeological correlate of kids doing this kind of thing would be the removal from middens of objects that had a little bit of use life, or prettiness remaining. You see a pretty high concentration of just junk, especially if you had a large midden, and you had edges closer to camp where kids might be sort of searching more routinely. This was one of the most fun things for me to think, as an archeologist, because we tend to think of middens as dead zones, as areas that really don't have much going on, but actually I thought that it was fun to see that Pume children actually visit this a lot, and they're removing a lot of items from middens, so heads up, archeologists. Next slide.
Unlike kids here in industrialized settings, Pume kids do not have designated play spaces. They don't have playgrounds, they don't have their own bedrooms, they don't have anything like that. Their play space is 100% integrated with adult space, but there are some differences. One thing I noticed, that kids in Pume settlements move freely across public/private interfaces. They can go into any house at any time and say, “Hey, I'm hungry,” for example. Or “Hey I'm sick,” or “Hey I'm scared,” and any adult will take that kid in.
Like every kid I've ever known, little herds of these kids will try to find zones that are at least temporarily outside of adult notice, or supervision. They will create special spaces adjacent to camp. They will occupy empty houses or abandoned well fields, or even the dance plaza. Anywhere where they can find a space that's temporarily vacated by adults, and where they can do whatever they want without adults yelling at them. I would expect that in some of these, in maybe camp sites or areas with long term occupation, you might actually see the remains of children's play activities in areas that you would not consider to be active areas in the adult sense. Next slide.
I'm going talk a bit about subsistence. Pume kids don't really contribute a lot to subsistence. I've seen some other groups where foraging kids really do contribute a lot to subsistence. There are things like shell fish or fruit that are easy for kids to procure. Hunting and gathering is pretty challenging out here. It can be dangerous, it can be arduous, so Pume kids don't really contribute a lot. I saw them foraging around the edges of camps, but it was not very common. Basically, what they did was if they needed a snack, they would just go to a house and they would ask, including my house.
Foraging kids in Africa and Australia, again with more ready access to easily procured wild foods, have been observed targeting really low ranked resources for short trips. Ethnoarcheological studies of these children would expect a lot of the remains of these low-ranked nearby resources in camp middens. Here in the Pume case, I don't think we'd be able to see that. Next slide.
In societies like the Pume where there aren't a lot of kids, because of the long space between births, again, there's no specially designated spaces for children. Work and play activities are just intertwined almost completely without any seams at all. It would be very difficult to discern from adult behaviors and activities in the archeological record. Is it impossible to investigate children of the past? Particularly, would it be impossible to sort them out from the archeological remains of small, mobile foraging societies?
I would say, not necessarily. There were a few really interesting implications I was able to get out of these observations of Pume children that I think are provocative, and worth following up on. One of them is the central role of children in sharing and redistribution activities; the clean-up of small and particularly sharp debris in camp and households creating clean voids; the removal and modification of items from middens for playing and for learning; the use of abandoned or temporarily empty adult spaces as high value play areas. Next slide.
I would like to say that children are really interesting little critters. They do interact with their material world all the time. I think the activities I mentioned before are really germane to a variety of societies at different scales, going all the way up to agricultural or even industrialized settings. I mean, as a mental exercise, I like to picture a long term camp with no children at all. If you can try to imagine that. A camp in which sharing and clean up probably would still occur, but middens might end up containing a higher number of tools, and other sort of nice objects that had some use life remaining. Abandoned spaces might become truly dead, or completely devoid of any activity.
In conclusion, I think that it would be good for archeologists to be mindful of children's contributions to the archeological record. You'll notice I didn't bring up anything about knappable stone here, because the Pume do not have knappable stone, but I'm pretty sure that the kids would be using up a lot of knappable stone trying to make things, such as projectile points or scrapers. For any of you who have experimented in flint knapping, it's not easy. I'm sure the kids would make lots and lots of mistakes, and we would find those in the archeological record.
We need to remember, too, that children's goals are actually qualitatively different from adults, due to their unique physiologies, their roles in the communities, and in socioeconomic roles, and also basically what their goals are. I mean, kids are not motivated by the same things that adults are, as we know. They are motivated, for example, there's no motivation in terms of getting mates or keeping them. Little kids are just running around. They're keeping themselves alive, they're playing, they're learning like crazy, and they're trying to get as much food as they can get.
Next slide ... Is basically my thank you slide. I know this has sort of been a long day for everybody, but I would be happy to take questions.
Karen: Pei-Lin, thanks very much for that. What are the ages of the children that you're talking about? I'm really interested in when young boys and girls begin to get incorporated into the subsistence regime.
Pei-Lin: I would’ve seen that boys come in a little bit later because hunting trips involve so much travel. I see men go on 25 mile hunting trips in one day. Also because projectile technology is harder to make. Boys who are probably going out on hunting trips with their fathers, short forays, probably around the age of nine or ten, then kind of getting their hunting muscles really going around I'd say 14. Many of them are amazing, amazing marksmen with their bows and arrows. Little boys are doing target shooting constantly. In terms of procuring things, it's later in life for boys.
Little girls are going out and gathering probably around four or five years old, on short distance trips. The majority of the play and cleaning activities, and sharing activities that I saw would have been for kids of both ages probably starting at about three to four. Then they move into adult roles, really, at about 14 to 15.
Karen: Oh, okay. Is that the age at which they begin setting up their own households?
Pei-Lin: Yes, it's really kind of fun to see. Boys that young, rarely. I would say boys probably don't start beginning setting up households until they're in the 18 to 20 year old range, but girls I've seen get married as young as 14 to boys who would maybe be in the 18 year old range. A lot of those younger men are actually snatched up by women in their 50s, which is a whole other story. We saw a lot of these sort of December-May marriages, too, with much older women and very, very young boys.
Karen: How interesting.
Pei-Lin: A lot of my girlfriends thought so, too.
Stan: Pei-Lin, what is the life expectancy of children, in the sense ... How many children make it to adulthood?
Pei-Lin: You know, I don't have exact demographic numbers for that. We do have census data, but they're kind of out of date. I'll go with what I was able to observe during my two years there. I think that the infant mortality rate is probably somewhere around 20%. I think this would have been a lot lower in the past, but these folks are actually under a fair bit pressure from nearby ranching communities, which are essentially cutting off their access to areas that they normally would have been able to use. They're having a lot of constraints on mobility. During wet season is when we see those infant mortality rates rise up.
Stan: Thanks.
Karen: Are there any more questions for Pei-Lin? Well, thank you very much for joining us today. We'll see you all next week, when our Cotter award winners talk about their research.
Pei-Lin: Super, thanks for the invite.
Karen: Thanks a lot.
Description
Pei Lin Yu, NPS, 5/23/2013, ArcheoThursday
Duration
29 minutes, 20 seconds
Date Created
05/23/2013
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