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2 Beyond Victims Exploring the Identity of Sacrificed Infants and Children at La Cueva de Los Muertos Chiquitos, Durango, Mexico (AD 571–1168) John J. Crandall and Jennifer L. Thompson Mortuary analyses of collections found throughout Mesoamerica have highlighted many ways in which the living, including infants and children, are killed, buried, and subsequently treated by past societies (e.g., Fitzsimmons and Shimada 2011). The treatment of subadults (including infants, children, juveniles, and adolescents) around and after the time of their death is notably variable in ancient Mesoamerica. Subadult burials range from simple interments in the ground to the sacrifice and elaborate burial of groups of individuals in remote caves, at the feet of temples, and even in the walls and floors of compounds and homes in ancient towns. Scholars have increasingly focused on the ritual sacrifice of subadults in Mesoamerica as a way to understand the complex social lives of these ancient peoples and their religious practices and beliefs. These studies have set the stage for an investigation of the social and biological identities of those being sacrificed as well as those doing the sacrificing. Researchers have identified the practice of infant and child sacrifice, typically of individuals under age 10, throughout northern and central Mexico (Crandall et al. 2012b; Lopez Lujan 2005; Pijoan and Mansilla 1990, 1997; Sugiyama 2005), and more specifically among the Olmec (e.g., Follensbee 2006), the Maya (Ardren 2011; Geller 2011), at Teotihuacan (Serrano Sanchez 1993), and throughout South America (Gaither et al. 2008; Klaus et al. 2010; Tung and Knudson 2010; Andrushko et al. 2011). Interest in human sacrifice, however, has focused not on the individuals being sacrificed, but in most cases on the causality and impacts of such rituals in relation to the Sacrificed Children at La Cueva de Los Muertos Chiquitos, Durango, Mexico · 37 local ecology and various aspects of a society’s cultural system (e.g., Harner 1977). Special attention has been given to the ways in which sacrifice is used to expand and maintain the control of empires (e.g., Carrasco 1999; Sugiyama 2005; Tung and Knudson 2010) and how sacrifice fits into larger religious systems (Schultz 2010). Often young victims of sacrifice are simply referred to as “children” with little attention focused on their specific identities or the biological age cohorts into which they cluster. An alternative approach would be to ask: Do different communities prefer infants for sacrifice over older children? Are subadults with diseases valued as key participants in such rituals? Answering these and similar other questions will not only add to our knowledge of the context and role of ritual sacrifice in the past but also help us understand the lived identities and experiences of the subadults chosen for such rituals. Further, such an analysis would provide data regarding the social treatment of less spectacularly buried subadults by unraveling cultural notions of social age, identity, personhood, and liminality. Recently, the unique identities and liminal role of subadults—particularly infants—in sacrifice rituals has been emphasized by scholars (see Geller 2011 and Chapter 5). This scholarship and other bioarchaeological analyses of childhood (e.g., Chapters 1 and 11) have increasingly recognized the ways that the bodies of infants, children, and other subadults and their treatment, reflect the social identity of those individuals and the perception of different age classes in the past. The rituals , religious beliefs, and political systems that subadults are a part of are literally embodied biologically and/or reflected in their treatment at and after their physical death (Buikstra et al. 2011; Sofaer 2006). Bioarchaeologists can reconstruct the lives of these individuals by focusing on the lived identities and experiences of sacrificed infants and children. By using evidence from patterns in skeletal data and identifying which individuals and life stages are most associated with mortuary rituals , the details of actors in such rituals can be reconstructed. This information can shed new light on the religious practices of past peoples and allow cross-cultural research to unravel the social and ecological factors that put different members of a community at the center of such violent rituals. Here, data from a bioarchaeological analysis of a Tepehuan burial cave in Durango, Mexico, is used to reconstruct the identities of sacrificed subadults (including pre-weaned, weaning, and post-weaned individuals mostly older than age 10) during the Loma San Gabriel cultural phase (AD 660–1430). In particular, we provide evidence of patterning in age-at-death profiles and disease profiles that reflect the unique role of sick...

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