Parental Grief and Mourning in the Ancient Andes

Parental grief is an intense emotion shaped and mediated by cultural attitudes toward death, the strength of parent-child attachment, the age of the deceased child, and the role of children in society. Despite some assertions that high infant mortality or economic hardship may lessen parental grief, cross-cultural studies show that child death often causes emotional distress to parents, in particular mothers. Funerary treatments of children, especially infants, are often simplified, contradicting more immediate and immaterial expressions of parental grief that cannot be studied archaeologically. In this study, I examine the funerary treatment of children in ancient Andean Tiwanaku society (A.D. 500–1100). I assess the use of ritual practices and objects associated with children’s burials as indicative of children’s social identities and parental mourning. The nature of grave assemblages in regard to different ages of the children suggests that parental attitudes toward their children changed over the course of childhood. The choice of offerings seems to reflect parental attachment to and recognition of the child’s life. Modifications of ceramic vessels point to the intimate mourning gestures of grieving mothers who sought to provide their deceased children with the necessary offerings to assume their place among the community of venerated ancestors. This study draws on ethnographic, psychological, and ethnohistoric sources of parent-child bonds in the Andes and beyond to investigate children’s burials not merely as reflective of childhood and children’s role in society but as the material record of parental attachment and emotion in the past.