Introduction: Relational Understandings in the Archaeology of Ancient Maya Childhood

This special section examines ancient Maya childhood from the perspectives of relationality and relational ontologies. Relational approaches are useful for understanding childhood as they help move beyond the objective of only ‘finding children’ to underscore how children play a larger relational role in social, environmental, material, and cosmological worlds. Furthermore, the focus on children among these relational worlds provides critical perspectives on who and what can be considered human and how social persons come into being. The contributors engage, in particular, with Indigenous Maya ontologies in their examination of childhood as a foundational process in the making of social personhood.