Icon for a Primary Source

These images show a stone grave marker carved with symbols and a terracotta funerary urn containing the charred remains of an infant. The Tophet of Carthage is a cemetery for infants in the ruins of the North African city of Carthage, now located in… [more]

Icon for a Primary Source

The top photograph shows the mummified remains of the 15-year-old Inca child, known as the "Llullaillaco Maiden," who was sacrificed with two other children, a boy of seven years old, shown in the photograph below, and a six-year-old girl, whose… [more]

Icon for a Primary Source

The Phoenician terracotta vessel features a human face, the nose forming a narrow spout. The bottle is an archaeological find from Carthage, near modern Tunis, dated to 399 BCE-200 BCE. Archaeologists believe this object was a baby bottle. It could… [more]

Icon for a Primary Source

This infant burial is from Çatalhöyük , a Neolithic settlement in Turkey that was occupied continuously for 2,500 years, between 8000 and 6400 BCE. The infant was between six months and one year old, and the burial demonstrates great care. The… [more]

Icon for a Primary Source

This finely carved ivory doll with moveable arms and legs was found in the grave of a girl approximately five years of age in Tarragona, Spain, a port city south of Barcelona. It dates to the 3rd or 4th century CE. The girl's skeleton was adorned… [more]

Icon for a Case Study

Beryl Rawson

Images of two Roman marble sarcophagi increase students' awareness of material sources from Roman society and help them explore cultural differences through images from an unfamiliar society compared with visual material from their daily lives, raising questions about the place of childhood as a separate stage of life in pre-modern societies and about changing notions of childhood over time. echo [more]

Icon for a Primary Source

Death is part of every society, but the rituals and objects surrounding death have varied across centuries and continents. They can often reveal many things about the role of children and families within a culture, from the nature of grieving to… [more]