Conference "From Birth to Death. Individual and Social Dimensions of Age and Gender in Prehistory

One aim of prehistoric archaeology is to investigate the lives and deaths of people in the far past. However, critical aspects of every human's life such as age and gender often do not receive as much attention as they do in other social sciences. While gender has indeed become a popular field of research in recent years, the same cannot be said of age. Most studies have concentrated on a supposed male/female dichotomy, while ignoring the important affects that age has throughout a person's lifetime. - Age and gender are fundamental and inseparable principles which structure every person's life history and the formation ofsocial groups. Consequently, they must be taken into account in every reconstruction of prehistoric social processes. In this conference we would like to specifically address how these two aspects of human life interact in the context of Old World Prehistory from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age. We hope that this perspective will contribute to an archaeology that helps us learn about the people behind artefacts.