Author : Emilia M. Jastrzebska
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 438 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (788 download)
Book Synopsis Children in the Early Bronze Age Mortuary Customs of the Levant by : Emilia M. Jastrzebska
Download or read book Children in the Early Bronze Age Mortuary Customs of the Levant written by Emilia M. Jastrzebska and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the obvious presence of children and infants in each and every society their role in the ancient societies was a long neglected topic in the archaeology all over the world and the Near East is no exception. The concept of childhood and infancy and the attitude towards the youngest members of human populations only became a subject of sociological and archaeological studies in the last quarter of the 20th century. Even after the attention has been drawn to the topic of children, they still hold a secondary place in the scholarly debate. Burial customs are one of the sources to study the social structure and the intra-societal relations existing in ancient societies. Due to the complexity of those social interactions as well as possible multiple interpretations of mortuary behavior, they are a delicate tool that can often lead to misconceptions and therefore using them as sources of information requires special caution. Nevertheless, material remains of the burial customs are currently the only available evidence to study the adult-infant relations of the pre- and early-historic societies. So far no comprehensive study of childhood in the early urban societies of the Near East has been conducted and it is the author's impression that children are often thought to be considered non-entities by the ancient inhabitants of the region. This con-cept seems to be rooted in the practice of burying infants under the floors of houses rather than placing them together with the deceased adults in the extramural cemeteries. The current study was aimed at refuting this notion and presenting other possible inter-pretations of the child-related mortuary behavior. The analysis of evidence available for the area of the Levant for the period be-tween 3600 and 2000 BCE has led to two main conclusions. First, that such practice was not a common or long lasting custom in this region and second, that the children-related mortuary customs lend themselves to several interpretations and the one assum-ing infants' inferiority in the ancient societies does not find much support in the exca-vated evidence. Due to limited scope of the study the focus was placed on the spatial differentiation between the adults and the children, rather then on other aspects of burial domain such as funerary gifts or specific post-mortem treatment of the body. Two different patterns of child-related burial practices has been exposed in the coastal part of the Levant and in northern Syria/south-eastern Anatolia. In neither of them evidence of treating children as non-entities was sufficient to support this concept. On the contrary, in both cases it seems that infants and children were in fact treated in very similar manners and sometimes the youngest were buried in more elaborate or 'wealthier' burials than the adults, thus disproving their suspected inferiority. In the area of the coastal Levant the differential treatment does appear at times. A strong correlation of this differentiation and the periods of urban development and decline that can be observed in Early Bronze Age Palestine, points towards a major role urbanization and overpopulation played in shaping of the mortuary traditions of the region. The same cannot be said about the Syro-Anatolian section of the Euphrates ba-sin, where an entirely different pattern can be seen. There it seem that children and in-fants were usually treated equally with the adults in terms of the grave location and often also the grave type. Therefore, the independence of mortuary behavior from the age of the deceased was suggested for that region, even though exceptions were of course found. As a result of the study, the concept of infants' inferiority was in fact refuted, but the problem of the role of children in the society was not solved as much as exposed in its full complexity. A number of aspects of the study has to be studied in greater de-tail, of which the most interesting is the exact age at death at which the mortuary treat-ment changes (in cases where id does change). Unfortunately the published data are not sufficient to facilitate this study at the moment. Funerary equipment and differences in types of graves also call for more attention in the future analysis. Lastly the wider con-textual analysis involving determination of sizes and characters of the settlements to which the burials are affiliated will surely throw new light on our understanding of the way urbanization affected the mortuary traditions.
