Prehistoric Infants and Child Burials in Egypt and Sudan: Anthropological, Paleopathological and Paleo-Environmental study

Abstract

Abstract: Investigating the evidence of infants and children in the prehistoric period is surrounded by several constraints and challenges. This is in part due to the low preservation of subadult skeletal remains in the archaeological record, and/or burying them outside the main graveyards, while also due to excluding them from the archaeological interpretations in many other cases. Such facts contributed to defining the research objectives, questions, and methodology, and also contributed to increasing the sources of inaccuracy of the research results. However, with the absence of textual, artistic, and illustrated evidence, subadult burials becomes the only source of information about infants and children during the prehistoric period. Therefore, searching for the evidence of such burials through the archive data was the first step prior to extracting all the possible information which aided in producing data tables for all the 22 sites selected for the current study , where each burial in each site is described using the same attributes including the burial numbers, burial type and location, number of occupants, types and frequency of grave goods deposited in the burial, the position of body, head and face, sex, age, depth of burial, and any recorded pathological condition. Producing comparable attributes was crucial for further data analysis. The results of analyzing and interpreting such data proved to be of great significance in inferring a wide range of information about how children were viewed and treated by their families and peers, while also helped in detecting the similarities and differences in the mortuary practices which were performed towards infants and children, when compared to that of adults.