Stone Age tools. Credit: University of York
Researchers have discovered that women and children were just as likely as men to be buried with stone tools at a Stone Age grave site, challenging the assumption that such tools were associated only with men.
Working with the Latvian National Museum of History, the team analysed artefacts and stone tools found in the Zvejnieki cemetery in Latvia – one of the largest Stone Age burial sites.
Zvejnieki cemetery was used for more than 5,000 years and contains over 330 graves.
The researchers focused their study on stone tools made from materials like flint and quartz, which date to between 7500 and 2500 BCE during the Neolithic period. These kinds of tools are often dismissed by researchers as utilitarian and uninteresting.
“The site in Latvia has seen numerous investigations of the skeletal remains and other types of grave goods, such as thousands of animal teeth pendants,” says Dr Aimée Little, from the University of York in the UK.
“A missing part of the story was understanding, with greater depth, why people gave seemingly utilitarian items to the dead.”
The researchers analysed the tools using a multiproxy approach which involved considering technological, spatial, depositional and geological information about the stone tools.
Despite the long-standing belief that women in the Stone Age played more of a domestic role, while men did the hunting, the analysis found that women were just as, if not more, likely to be buried with stone tools.
“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of “Man the Hunter” which has been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and has even influenced, on occasion, how some infants have even been sexed, on the basis that they were given lithic tools,” says Little.
The results also showed that children were the most likely age group to have been buried with these tools. The full analysis of the burial site has been published in PLOS One.
The researchers suggest that these stone tools must have played a more significant role in Stone Age society than previously assumed.
While some of the tools discovered were used to work animal hides, others seemed to have been specifically made and then broken – almost as though they were a part of a mourning ceremony or ritual.
“This research demonstrates that we cannot make these gendered assumptions and that lithic grave goods played an important role in the mourning rituals of children and women, as well as men,” says Dr Anđa Petrović from the University of Belgrade, Serbia.
Previous studies have uncovered similar traditions of deliberately breaking tools before burying them with the deceased across the eastern Baltic region, suggesting some sort of shared ritual tradition. Comparable funerary practices have also been observed in graves from a similar time period in Finland.
“The study highlights how much more there is to learn about the lives – and deaths – of Europe’s earliest communities, and why even the seemingly simplest objects can unlock insights about our shared human past and how people responded to death,” says Little.