6 - Age

Summary

no-one has ever grown out of biology or grown into society or culture.

Ingold 2001a: 235

The body is subject to a range of different narratives with regard to age and ageing (Featherstone and Hepworth 1998). On one hand, the investigation of age highlights links between the biological and the social (Featherstone and Hepworth 1998: 159) as physiological changes to the body that occur throughout the life course become key sites for social engagement and are incorporated into social life through processes of cultural negotiation. On the other hand, the perceived boundedness of the body has often meant that it is understood in terms of its limits, while its materiality, powerfully expressed though its inevitable decline and eventual death, is also taken to describe a limit to the social (Featherstone and Hepworth 1998). The lives of people are subject to biological limitations and the body is a limited biological resource (Elias 1985). It is the materiality of the body that lends it its finitude (Elias 1985; Harré 1991; Featherstone and Hepworth 1998).

As with sex and gender, there are a number of significant tensions in the ways that archaeologists currently use the body to identify age. These also arise from deeply engrained aspects of archaeological practice that reflect a divide between osteoarchaeology and interpretative archaeology, and they generate a series of theoretical and methodological problems. The investigation of age brings the relationship between osteoarchaeology and interpretative archaeology into sharp relief.