Precious People: Indigenous Medical-Spiritual Relations in the Archaeology of Maya Childhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous studies of bodily ornaments from burial contexts have often fixated on notions of wealth, social inequality, and prestige. Although such considerations are often pertinent, our work provides a complementary perspective incorporating Indigenous and ladino (mestizo) medical-spiritual understandings of bodily ornaments. We find that this perspective is best understood through a focus on children. In particular, this paper examines the marine shell, bone, ceramic, and stone bracelets and necklaces of children from Late and Terminal Classic burials at the Maya site of Ucanal, Petén, Guatemala, and compares them to burials from a range of time periods in the same region of the eastern Maya Lowlands. In addition, by incorporating ethnographic and ethnohistoric research on Indigenous Maya and ladino practices, we underscore the relational understandings of Maya ornaments worn by children and their role in the articulation of caring relations between parents and their precious children, in repelling spiritual forces and winds carrying illnesses, and in the making of social persons. While attention and respect for Indigenous medical-spiritual practices are slowly but increasingly recognized in contemporary medical practices in Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere, archaeological perspectives also benefit from such perspectives on children and their well-being.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".