Paper short abstract:

Is it possible to identify maturation events that correspond with the changes of puberty? The timing of puberty can be influenced by environmental factors, and analysing these indicators among archaeological populations can provide an insight into the progress of puberty in the past.

Paper long abstract:

Bioarchaeologists have often struggled to identify where the boundary between childhood and adulthood fell in past societies, a threshold which is both a biological and a social construct. In societies where date of birth was rarely formally recorded, the perception of individuals as children or adults was inevitably dependent on the physical process of puberty, but this is a subject that has received little attention to date in bioarchaeology. Using modern data, however, it is possible to identify specific dental and skeletal maturation events that closely correspond with the external changes of puberty, such as the adolescent growth spurt and the start of menstruation. The speed and timing of puberty has been shown to be influenced by environmental factors such as nutrition, exposure to infection, stress and physical labour. Analysing these indicators alongside chronological age in archaeological populations can therefore provide an insight into the progress of puberty in past societies, and the possible environmental and social factors that may have affected this maturation process. These techniques have been applied for the first time to a group of large cemetery sites from medieval England, to try to shed light on the experience of adolescence in this period.

This research forms part of the 'Adolescence, Migration and Health in Medieval England' research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.