Becoming, Being and Transforming : A Multi-analytical Approach to Diet, Mobility and Decay in the Remains of an Iron Age Child from Öland

Sammanfattning

Human remains occupy a particular evidental position in archaeology: they preserve biological traces of lived experience while also materializing the effects of death, deposition, and long-term transformation. While broad population studies are essential for addressing large-scale demographic and cultural questions, the Rösslösa child demonstrates the analytical power of a single body. At this scale, diet, mobility, mortaury context, and diagenesis emerge not as separate datasets, but as interconnected processes through which this human body becomes archaeological. By integrating archaelogical science with body theory, this study brings together evidence often interpreted separately. The study identifies a predominantly terrestrial diet signal, a childhood environment broadly consistent with the regional Öland landscape, and evidence of post-depositional interaction between the body and burial environment. The contribution is therefore not a new theory of diagenesis, but a high-resolution operationalization of archaeological body theory through archaeological science. It suggests the value of approaching human remains not solely as biological assemblages, but as archaeological bodies shaped by the processes of Becoming, Being and Transforming.