Where do the children go? Funerary treatments of juveniles within collective burial sites in neolithic Southern France

Pages: 56-80

Abstract:

Collective burials are funerary deposits that accumulate over time with the regular or sequential addition of corpses. This was the main funerary practice towards the end of the Neolithic and during the beginning of the Bronze Age in the south of France. Some types of tombs (e.g. megalithic tombs) necessitated a huge investment of time and labour. According to ethnographic studies, these monumental tombs are generally built and managed collectively. We can thus ponder who was buried inside these tombs because some archaeological studies indicate that access to such tombs may sometimes be restricted to only certain members of the population. Indeed, ethnography highlights that access to certain tombs may be structured by variables such as kinship, social status, etc. This paper will focus on the variable of age, which is often a cause for exclusion or segregation within the burial, and therefore raises questions regarding the age at which individuals become sufficiently 'valuable' to be include in the social organisation. While previous studies have mainly focused on architecture and the function of these monuments, there has been less consideration of the deposition process of human remains and therefore on the population profile buried inside those funerary places. Since 2012, a project was undertaken on burial sites from the south of France. The aim was to define the population profile, be they cave deposits or megalithic monuments, along with the deposition process of the bodies within the structures. These studies have highlighted that a special treatment (exclusion, localisation etc.) was afforded to the youngest individuals (under 5 years of age), suggesting they had a different social status.

Source: Scopus