Paul Klostermann et alii – Child Space 2025 | Day 2 Session 3 – Feeding with Love

Описание: Bioarchaeological Approaches to Adolescence in Early Medieval Central Europe

Paul Klostermann, Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria; Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Margit Berner, Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria
Sabine Eggers, Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria
Zuzana Hofmanová, Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Doris Pany-Kucera, Department of Anthropology, Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria
Bendeguz Tobias, Institute for Medieval Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
Ke Wang, Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany; State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, Collaborative Innovation Center for Genetics and Development, and Human Phenome Institute, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
and Mary Lewis, Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, Reading, UK

The bioarcheology of adolescence is a novel sub field in childhood research that explores the life history period between childhood and adulthood through osteological indicators that allow us to reconstruct growth and development from puberty to adulthood. Most data of pubertal timing in the past so far comes from Western and Southern Europe. This study is the first to investigate adolescent development in Eastern Central Europe and also the first from the early medieval period. This provides a continuous analysis of the timing of sexual maturation from previously published Roman to the late medieval period. In total the adolescent timing of 89 individuals from two rural cemeteries from the late Avar period in Austria was reconstructed from skeletal and dental indicators. Genetic biological sex estimation was applied to all adolescents, making this the first study to provide robust sex-specific insights into growth and development patterns in this context. While variation in dental development exists, dental age estimates appear to show that, females were on average 1–2 years younger than males at each development stage. Adolescents during the late Avar period exhibited delayed development compared to their Roman counterparts (up to 2.3 years) and, to a lesser extent, the late medieval population (up to 1.2 years). These developmental differences likely reflect variations in genetic background and the influence of contrasting urban and rural living conditions. The minimum age of menarche increased by approximately three years from the Roman period to the end of the medieval period, while general ages of maturation were comparable between the early and later medieval periods. The physiological transition to adolescence correlates with material evidence, including an increase in burial goods at the studied sites.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC), grant agreement n° 856453 ERC-2019-SyG.

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