Ghost Children: Delayed Personhood and Culture-specific Models of Infancy in Western Anatolia

Abstract

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.

On the traces of lost identities: chronological, anthropological and taphonomic analyses of the Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic fragmented and commingled human remains from the Farneto rock shelter (Bologna, northern Italy)

“…Regarding sex and age at death, both male and female individuals and all age classes are attested, so that a horizontal intentional selection of the individuals to be buried can be excluded. The paucity of perinatal or very young infant remains, testified by one single specimen (the complete left humerus C4-61), can be explained by several reasons that are not mutually exclusive: their natural fragility (Gordon and Buikstra 1981;Guy et al 1997), their misidentification during recovery (Schaefer et al 2009), possible underlying ideologies and/or funerary practices that originally led to their exclusion (Guy et al 1997;Cveček and Schwall 2022).…”