Tuesday, November 11, 2014

News: Ice Age Infant Burials in Alaska!

Two of them! Plus the cremation of a three-year-old; all buried underneath a living floor, which is a behavior common in Ice Age burials from all over. Even in warmish places, so it probably wasn't just that the ground elsewhere was too hard.

The most remarkable thing, to me, is that such a high percentage of the low number of Ice Age American burials we have are the burials of small children. When you think how delicate the unformed bones are - particularly of the one who apparently wasn't even born, but was a miscarriage (how, I wonder, are they sure it wasn't a preemie?) - and how rare any organic human remains are from this period, it's striking. And then there's the fact that the infants were buried and the three-year-old was cremated, in the same place, at about the same time? Were there age-dependent variables on burial customs? Was there a lot of individual variation and parental choice? Was the culture sufficiently stratified that the three-year-old and the two infants came from different status families and were treated differently on that basis? Did it make a difference how someone died?

It is impossible to answer these questions with such a small sample. It is equally impossible not to speculate.

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