Most societies view infants and partially children, up to a certain age, as not fully human beings and/or persons. This paper takes a longue durée perspective to examine built spaces shared by the living and dead infants during the four millennia (seventh to third millennium BC) in Anatolia. Evidence of infant burials within and around houses in several prehistoric periods and sites is analysed through a child-centred approach to mortuary remains, which does not equate adults with subadults or fully human with not fully human beings. This allows us to gain new perspectives of how age, age groups and infancy or childhood were perceived in prehistory. By perceiving houses as social spaces where ritual and non-ritual mimesis is embodied in shared practices and beliefs, where the material and social collide, rather than simply as signifiers of social units, we are better able to grasp subadult identities and decipher the personhood of infants and children through mortuary practices. Through our Anatolian case study, we provide socio-anthropological explanations for keeping the ‘ghost children’, buried close to houses, due to delayed personhood. We argue for constructing culture-specific models of infancy based on the archaeological evidence in Anatolia and beyond.

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Çukuriçi Höyük 4. Household Economics in the Early Bronze Age Aegean is a pioneering interdisciplinary account of households and socio-political organization in Aegean prehistory, written by a socio-cultural anthropologist embedded in a team of prehistoric archaeologists. Sabina Cveček applies methods of historical anthropology to address key issues in discussing households and socio-political organization at the dawn of the Bronze Age Aegean and beyond. By navigating through the “dwelling perspective” at two prehistoric mound sites, namely Çukuriçi Höyük in western Anatolia (Turkey) and Platia Magoula Zarkou in Thessaly (Greece), Cveček scrutinizes the conflicting relations between metanarratives and site-based archaeological contexts, complemented by historical ethnographic accounts. This unique interdisciplinary contribution will appeal not only to specialists in Aegean prehistory and historical anthropologists, but also to scholars in the social sciences and humanities. It may inspire scholars to recognize the unparalleled value of archaeological materiality in addressing non-state imagined communities, alongside historical, ethnographic, and other written sources.

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