To browse Academia. This bibliography provides a comprehensive assembly of entries focused on children in the ancient world, illustrating the significant aspects of childhood across various cultures, social settings, and historical periods.
The document serves as a crucial resource for scholars researching childhood and related themes in Antiquity, offering an organized collection that spans literature, history, and sociocultural dynamics. The archeological literature reports many cases of funerary contexts characterized by the exclusive presence of perinates, generally marked by "unusual" or "weak" rituals.
The topic of infanticide has been repeatedly recalled for Greek and Roman funerary contexts, as suppression of unhealthy infants or for practical-economic reasons. Emblematic in this respect is the dispute about the Carthaginian tofet, traditionally interpreted, on iconographic and textual evidence, as place for sacrificed infants. The historical-archaeological debate on this peculiar graveyard has also involved the analysis of the skeletal remains with contrasting results.
From the same skeletal series two distinct research groups have derived two different demographic profiles: a group suggests ages at death of few months for most the individuals, the other group emphasizes an equal sex ratio among the deceased and pointing out the presence of a high number of pre-term fetuses and perinates. The first evidence is read as infant sacrifice in Carthage, implying a possible emotional detachment lack of love?
This communication presents a critical review of the aforementioned evidence, acknowledging the key role of skeletal analyses, and demographic and epidemiological modeling such as the phenomenon of the reproductive wastage , in constructing alternative hypotheses. The best are borrowed from R. All in all, then, it is a mixed volume which reflects its long period of gestation and composite authorship.
