ePrints

The Extended Life Course in Ancient Athens: Material Culture as Evidence for Children’s Identities Beyond Embodied Existence

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Emma Gooch

Downloads

• Accepted version [.pdf]

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

Extended life course theory proposes identities do not have to be embodied, so the as-yet-unborn and the dead can have identities and personhood. Children are an apt case study for exploring whether societies envision identity extending beyond embodied existence, because non-adults exist towards the beginning of the life course and have some predictable transformations outstanding upon death. Literary sources indicate ancient Athenian ontology acknowledged extended life courses that deviated from embodied ones. Literary sources, burials, gravestones and painted pottery demonstrate juveniles existed both before birth and after death, and could retain identities following the latter. After death, children’s identities were often prolonged. More rarely, they could be projected; to move juveniles further along the normative life course than they had corporeally experienced. This article argues that a social impetus for projecting identity in ancient Athens was acknowledging exceptional lost potential.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Gooch E

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology

Year: 2024

Volume: 37

Issue: 1

Online publication date: 05/09/2024

Acceptance date: 03/05/2024

Date deposited: 28/05/2024

ISSN (print): 0952-7648

ISSN (electronic): 1743-1700

Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd

URL: https://doi.org/10.1558/jma.31235

DOI: 10.1558/jma.31235

ePrints DOI: 10.57711/tzte-7g52

Altmetrics

Share