P.B. Pettitt. Neanderthal Lifecycles: Development and Social Phases in the Lives of the Last Archaics. World Archaeology, Vol. 31, No. 3, Human Lifecycles (Feb., 2000), pp. 351-366.
In her article, Neanderthal Lifecycles: Development and Social Phases in the Lives of the Last Archaics, P.B. Pettitt offers an interpretation of Neanderthal ontogeny and lifecycles in the context of the archaeological record in an effort to gain insight as to how Neanderthal individuals would have constructed their societies. She addresses this question in two parts, first presenting data on Neanderthal ontogeny and lifecycles, then constructing an interpretative vision of Neanderthal society.
Pettitt undertakes a strategy of examining Neanderthal remains through categorization of individuals according to lifecycles phase, demonstrating that Neanderthals were subjected to considerable and habitual physical stress and exertion as well as inordinately high levels of physical trauma from a young age, noting a high preponderance of healed upper body insults, but near absence of survival after injuries impeding mobility. In her treatment of mortality, Pettitt notes that Neanderthal profiles differ from AMHs in their greater proportion of death at prime age, and relatively few examples of individuals surviving into old age. She attributes the infrequency of aged individual remains to a rarity of deliberate burials for this demographic as well as a similar trend regarding those under 4 or 5 years of age at death, seldom uncovered as single burials.
In her reconstruction of Neanderthal lifecycles, Pettitt pays special attention to the high level of recovered prime adults, and this deficiency of aged individuals and singularly buried infants. She suggests this is a reflections of mortuary practices, which in the absence of evidence for complex verbal communication or abstract art serve as a medium for recognizing a social significance directly based on an ability to contribute to the group. She proposes that this ability to produce for the group constituted the basis for social organization, pointing to maturation and transformation through trauma as the two crucial factors in determining social worth. She identifies weaning, marked by independence and resulting heightened risk of mortality, as the point at which Neanderthals gain recognition as individuals of value. Sexual maturity completes this transformation as value is solidified through an ability to contribute to the hunt, reproduce, and provide for younger siblings. She hypothesizes that from this point on, death is recognized as a loss to the group and marked with a burial. Status as an individual of value can however be diminished or lost after sustaining debilitating trauma or reaching an age where contribution begins to decline. In this case death does not hold the same meaning of loss, and is therefore less likely to be recognized by the group. She points to a lack of healed lower body insults as evidence for the abandonment of injured individuals during travel, where their remains are less likely to be preserved. Pettitt suggests that mortuary practices would only be performed so long as social value had been achieved and maintained up until the time of death.
Pettitt’s framing of her article as ‘interpretive’ makes criticism of her arguments more difficult. The paper is well laid out and logical, but highly speculative as she reconstructs an entire social structure from a lack of evidence for developed verbal communication, a lack of evidence for symbolic art, and a lack of examples of deliberate burials for the very young and the very old. Attributing the deficiency of very young and very old Neanderthals to burial practices, or lack there of, is the basis of her entire argument. This is quite a leap of faith. The elaborate extrapolation of data is surely imaginative, creative and interesting, however I question how positive a contribution it is given the severe lack of supporting evidence involved, and near impossibility of proving or disproving a theory undetectable in the archaeological record. Pettitt’s narrative may very well strike closely to the true social structure and psychology of Neanderthals, but we will be hard pressed to ever evaluate its validity.
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