Ageing, Childhood and Social Identity in the Early Neolithic of Central Europe

Abstract

In this paper, osteological and archaeological data are brought together to further our understanding of childhood in the early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK; c. 5500-5000 cal BC). In many characterizations of LBK society, fixed representations of sex or identities based on subsistence strategies pervade, with children rarely considered and then only as a specialized and separate topic of study. As a challenge to this view, a summary of the current models of childhood in the LBK culture is presented and debated with reference to the burial rites of children. A period of 'middle' childhood is proposed for the LBK culture. The osteological evidence suggests that childhood could be a time of dietary stress, perhaps with sex-based differences from childhood, and examples of the diseases and traumas suffered are discussed. Finally, the possibility that the children were actively contributing to acts of personal violence is raised. While the recognition of identity making as a continuous process remains a powerful exploratory route to investigating prehistoric societies, we argue that this should not discourage us from seeing identity as formed over the entire lifecourse.

Thinking Gender Differently: New Approaches to Identity Difference in the Central European Neolithic

“…Overall, however, the variability in dietary-based evidence is less than for the data discussed above, and at the sites where average δ 15 N values varied between the sexes, the variation was over the same range (Hedges et al 2013, table 9.6). These data will not encompass all of the possible variations for LBK lifeways (more could be said about ageing here: Bickle & Fibiger 2014;Hofmann 2009), but it does suggest that, unlike for daily tasks and activities, diet was more a communal sphere rather than a place for social differentiation. Across these different categories, we see places of more and less variation, in which the differences within sexes can be greater than between them, as well as instances of shared practice.…”

“…In sum, grave goods were in a minor way being influenced by the biological sex of the individual in the grave, but body position and grave orientation were not (in comparison to late Copper and Bronze Age burials: Sofaer Derevenski 1997). In the LBK, age of the deceased also correlates with increasing or decreasing frequency of grave goods (Hedges et al 2013, 379;Hofmann 2009) and body position (Bickle & Fibiger 2014). Rather than defining the whole set of funerary rites, sex thus appears in a small part of the funerary sphere, related to selection of a limited range of grave goods.…”

A 6500-year-old Middle Neolithic child from Pollera Cave (Liguria, Italy) with probable multifocal osteoarticular tuberculosis

“…This may be explained in a variety of ways, including differential funerary treatment for children in the past and thus remains being "invisible" (e.g. Bickle and Fibiger, 2014), differential preservation of juvenile skeletal remains (Bello et al, 2006), or a different level of virulence of the infecting MTBC strain or host resistance in the past which would likely have killed individuals before they could develop skeletal changes (Palkovic, 1981;Wood et al, 1992). However, lesions attributed to TB have been described in children from the Roman period in Britain (Lewis, 2011) and Hungary (Hlavenkova et al, 2015), showing that the lesions of TB can be recognized in the archaeological record of children.…”

The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe

“…Individuals between the ages of 9 and 15 y seem not to be represented in the mass grave. This peculiar subadult demography pattern is significantly different from the overall 0-to 8-y-old and 8-to 17-y-old LBK samples currently available from both cemetery (χ 2 = 7.684; P = 0.006) and settlement burials (χ 2 = 6.109; P = 0.013) (57). Among the adults, younger adult individuals predominate; only two were more than 40 y old (Table S4).…”