Childhood in protohistory in the southern Carpathian Basin: examples from the Urnfield Period

Childhood in protohistory in the southern Carpathian Basin is a research project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. The research objectives of the project are: to determine the biological age and gender of the children ; to research the social age of children in protohistoric communities and to recognise life phases in young populations of protohistoric communities. Project team try to reconstruct the everyday life of children by analysing different material traces, especially through the data on health, diet, costume, and personal items. Multidisciplinary interpretation of the collected data give us insight into play, work, the children's relationship to their environment, and child-related rituals. The goals of the project is researched on three levels: each community separately ; within a time period and diachronically through protohistory from the 14th century BC to the 2nd century BC within the chronological framework. The envisaged multidisciplinary research (archaeology, anthropology, residue analyses, stabile isotope analyses) use the archaeological context of the found material traces of children and their activities as the basic criterion for researching childhood in the past. Planned and controlled analyses within natural sciences will provide more knowledge on the diet and ritual of protohistoric communities. A joint interpretation will provide a more comprehensive view of the past through current methodologies of research applied to the archaeology of childhood. Some examples from the Late Bronze Age communities in the southern Carpathian Basin will be presented in this paper. The biological and social age as well as the funerary context will be used in the reconstruction of their role in the hierarchy of a particular community and the change of perception through the period of the Urnfield culture.