What the burial of a 4 year old boy says about daily life more than 24 000 years ago

Antropologi.info is mainly about social anthropology. So, maybe now it’s time to get inspired by a paper from a neighbouring discipline - archaeology. Lukas Loeb has sent me this paper that he’d like to share with others: The Human Burial of the Abrigo Lagar Velho Child. An analysis of human burial and the understanding of social relations and ancient society.

Loeb is currently a student in the Social Science and Economy Department at the University of Agder, Norway. The paper was written as a part of an anthropology course he took at the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 2009/2010. The course, an Introduction to World Archaeology, provided a survey of world archeology from the emergence of humankind to the beginning of state societies.

What is your essay about, Lukas Loeb?

– My essay is about the human burial of the Abrigo Lagar Velho Child, and the introduction of modern humans in Europe. How we can use a single burial to discover ancient cultures and study their social life by the burial itself and the tools and vegetation surrounding it?

In your email to me, you wrote this is an important topic that you’d like to share with others. Why?

– Many say that the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe because the continent were overtaken by modern humans. My essay discusses the important topic of the modern humans and Neanderthals interacted and that there were some sort of gene flow between these two human species.

Is this discussion also relevant for cultural-  and social anthropologists?

– I would say that this discussion is both important and relevant for both cultural- and social anthropologists, this essay discusses and analyzes the burial itself and how it reflects to the religion, social life, hierarchy and status that was present 24,500 BP.
 
As a bonus: Some links for those who want to know more about your topic?

João Zilhão: Fate of the Neandertals (archaeology.org)

Lagar Velho - the Hybrid Child from Portugal (donsmaps.org)

João Zilhão and Erik Trinkaus (ed): Portrait of the Artist as a Child. The Gravettian Human Skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho and its Archeological Context (scribd.com)

Thanks for this short interview!

Download the paper (pdf, 421kb)