This is a chapter from the book "Children, Spaces and Identity" entitled "Infant Burials During the Copper and Bronze Ages in the Iberian Jarmama River Valley".
|A young Madrid woman, child behind her.|
The authors take a chunk of time in the Jarama valley of Iberia, 3,000 B.C. to 1,500 B.C., and look at how children were treated in death over time. This is in the center of the Iberian Peninsula.
Period 1: The Early Chalcolithic before the Beakers.
We have a Early Chalcolithic phase that is basically community tombs. Bunch of people piled in a cave or in a barrow. Children over a year of age are buried with everyone else and become community ancestors.
Period 2: Beginning of the Beaker Age. We have two types of people that are contemporary and live close to one another...
a) Children/Adults buried without Bell Beaker pottery.
The skeletons of these people suggest they worked hard, died young. Adults are single burial in pits with little worldly goods. No children under six months old are ever found, all other children are grouped together and no single burial of a child is found, and certainly without worldly goods.
b) Children buried with adults and Beaker pottery is present.
These people are often buried in small, nuclear collectives, something along the line of mom, dad and children or otherwise closely related people. Men outnumber women like everywhere in Beakerworld.
They appear to have been wealthier in burial having exotic, costly or rare items. They also occupy spaces that took a lot of effort to construct. Isotopes show their diet was high in meat and dairy and the mortality numbers suggest they lived longer than people buried without beakers. People buried with Beaker pottery don't exhibit the kind of repetitive physical stress markers that the people buried without exhibit. Beaker children above the age of 6 months are buried, but always buried with an adult.
I suspect that graves were reopened for children so they could be buried with an adult. At a later time I'll expand on some evidence for the 'Beaker underworld' and the kinds of tests and trickery found in a Bronze Age Hades.
Period 3: The Bronze Age
Basically this is now our modern situation. All children of any age from their first breath are buried completely and fully as an individual person. A strange caveat is that these children are buried with a dog. That's right. The authors suggest the dog was a protector for the afterlife, and again I'll pitch my sometime-in-the-future-canoeing-through-purgatory comments.
Lastly, the authors note that the Beaker children were not achievers and did not earn or merit a higher status by our understanding. Again, I think this has the marks of ethnicity, but only a few hundred miles up the Tagus and Douro Rivers! What!?
That's why I love this. Bang head here.