Childhood Activity in Nascent Urbanization

PLOS One, 2020

Multiple arguments for or against the presence of 'urban' settlements in the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant have identified the need to compare these settlements against their rural hinterlands through multiple lines of evidence. This meta-analysis of zooarchaeo-logical data from the region compares and identifies patterns of animal production, provi-sioning and consumption between the supposed "urban" and rural sites of the southern Levant from the Early Bronze (EB) against the (more widely recognised urban) Middle Bronze (MB) Ages. It also identifies distinct and regionally specific patterns in animal production and consumption that can be detected between urban and rural sites of the southern Levant. The taxonomic and age profiles from EB Ia and Ib sites do not demonstrate any urban versus rural differentiation patterning, even though fortifications appear in the EB Ib. Beginning in the EB II and clearly visible in the EB III, there is differentiation between rural and urban sites in the taxonomic and age proportions. Differentiation is repeated in the MB II. The clear differentiation between "urban" and rural zooarchaeological assemblages from the EB II-III and MB suggest that rural sites are provisioning the larger fortified settlements. This pattern indicates that these sites are indeed urban in nature, and these societies are organized at the state-level. From the EB II onwards, there is a clear bias in the large centres towards the consumption of cattle and of subadult sheep and goats with a corresponding bias in smaller rural sites towards the consumption of adult sheep and goats and a reduced presence of cattle. After the emergence of this differential pattern, it disappears with the decline in social complexity at the end of the Early Bronze Age, only to come 'back again' with the re-emergence of urban settlement systems in the Middle Bronze Age.

ICAANE, 2014

The specificity of burials allows for gaining information concerning the culture of ancient populations, in particular their relation to death, and their perception of the biological status of living populations. Our focus is to bring to light children’s burials coming from the Khabur Ware period levels in Mozan, ancient Urkesh, which are dated between 2000-1600 BC. The analysis of burial practices through osteological observations has provided evidence of age-related characteristics. Indeed, the funerary treatment of the children has proven to have been different from that of the adults.

2014

The Archaeology of Jordan: a reader, ed. Russell B. Adams, 2008

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2008

Recently, the value of the study of children and childhood from archaeological contexts has become more recognized. Childhood is both a biological and a social phenomenon. However, because of specialization in research fields within anthropology, subadults from the archaeological record are usually studied from the biological perspective (bioarchaeology) or, more predominantly, the social perspective (social archaeology), with little research that incorporates both approaches. These polarized approaches to childhood and age highlight the dualistic way in which "biological" and "social" aspects of the body are viewed. Some recent literature criticizes bioarchaeological approaches, and calls for the incorporation of childhood social theory, including social age categories, into subadult health analysis. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the practicalities or theoretical issues that need to be considered when attempting this. This paper critically examines these issues, including terminology used for defining subadulthood and age divisions within it, and approaches to identify "social age" in past populations. The important contribution that bioarchaeology can make to the study of social aspects of childhood is outlined. Recent theoretical approaches for understanding the body offer exciting opportunities to incorporate skeletal remains into research, and develop a more biologically and socially integrated understanding of childhood and age.

Childhood in the Past, 2021

The crucial roles played by young people in the lives of ancient urban and civic spaces has been underestimated in discussions of urban life. Through our case study in Roman Egypt, we scrutinize expectations placed on young people, the specific roles they would have taken in these environments, and their agency in shaping, and responding to, the expectations and demands placed on them by their physical and social environments. The discussion addresses three major themes: young people's visibility and accessibility within the city scape; expectations placed on young people and their agency in responding to them; and the geographical and practical limits of movement for young people. The research is based on papyri from the Roman Egyptian metropolis of Oxyrhynchos and its administrative area, from late first century BCE to sixth century CE, and a resulting database of over 700 cases mentioning children and young people.

Household Archaeology in …, 2011

… , infans, puerulus vobis mater terra: la …, 2008

2016

Early Bronze Age urbanization and urbanism in the Levant have long been important themes in scholarly discussion, with both the nature of the process and its results being the subject of lively debate. We view Early Bronze II (EB II) south Levantine urbanism as a novel ideological construct grounded in heterarchical modes of social organization, rather than a direct development from earlier village-based lifestyles. In the current study we employ a phenomenological approach that enables us to identify an urban habitus and to discuss cognitive aspects of town life, rather than constraining the discussion to urban morphology. Tel Bet Yerah in northern Israel is a good place to approach these issues, as it presents a continuous, extensively excavated Early Bronze Age sequence. One of the most prominent elements of the EB II fortified city is a system of paved streets that constructed space in a clear geometric pattern. The investment in street planning and engineering, alongside other aspects of planning, no doubt played a key role in the inculcation of urban concepts at the site. As shared public spaces, the streets were experienced and modified through the everyday practices of the town’s inhabitants and visitors. It is the negotiation between planning, ideology and practice that makes the streets of Bet Yerah an exemplary case of the role of architecture in promoting and sustaining a new social order.

Med hjärta och hjärna. En vänbok till professor Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh, Göteborg, Institutionen för historiska studier. GOTARC Series A. Gothenburg Archaeological Studies, Vol. 5, 2014

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 1999

Extensive ethnographic and archaeological research demonstrates that primary and secondary mortuary rituals provide people with a richly textured context to reweave the social fabric of the community following the death of one of its members. The nature, timing, and communal participation in secondary mortuary ceremonies, in particular, allow individuals and groups to reiterate the broader moral and social ethos of the community, while reaffirming, renegotiating, or even severing bonds of social, political, and economic life. Drawing on this anthropological foundation, this study explores the powerful changes in household structures and systems of kinship during the first period of urbanization in Syro-Palestine by examining the skeletal, architectural, and artifactual evidence from the cemeteries at the Early Bronze Age settlement of Bab edh-Dhra', Jordan. Dynamic changes in mortuary practices through time at Bab edh-Dhra', specifically the shift from shaft tomb burials to charnel houses, were associated with the transition from a non-sedentary lifestyle to settled life in a fortified town and a subsequent return to non-urban living. This research demonstrates that each of these profound shifts in lifestyle involved fundamental changes in the societal bonds of the community, particularly structures of kinship.

Assyromania and More, 2018

The burial data from the southern Levant during the Late Bronze/Early Iron Ages suggest that the majority of bangles found in funerary contexts in which the age or sex of the deceased can be identified were associated most frequently with children, and secondly with young females. They apparently donned them as early as infancy and wore them continuously until reaching some stage in early adulthood beginning around age thirteen. These observations led to an exploration of what socially constructed circumstances might have limited bangle-wearing primarily to children, and why some children were found with them and others were not. Recent anthropological and archaeological studies on defining childhood and children’s varied roles, as well as information gleaned from ancient Near Eastern texts, suggest that children may have been perceived in a number of ways in the ancient southern Levant, differentiated from each other through such characteristics as age group within childhood, gender, marriage status, class, and economic function.