The UAB leads a multidisciplinary study on the Iberian baby burials of Ullastret
A UAB Biological Anthropology research team, in collaboration with the MAC-Ullastret, has re-evaluated the archaeological context of the burial deposits and for the first time applied genetic analysis to infant skeleton remains. The study rules out sex or age selection, or sacrificial death, and demonstrates the family ritual character of the burials, which were performed in the houses as a normalised practice. A significant number of infant burials have yet to be discovered at the site.
Members of the Biological Anthropology Research Group (GREAB) of the UAB, Assumpció Malgosa and Carolina Sandoval, together with the head of the main office of the Archaeological Museum of Catalonia in Ullastret (MAC-Ullastret), Gabriel de Prado, today presented the results of a comprehensive and multidisciplinary study on the burials of infants from the Iberian site of Ullastret, dating back to the Iron Age (first millennium BC). The presentation took place at the MAC, in Barcelona.
The remains of the Ullastret infants have been excavated since the 1950s and the latest anthropological studies date from the 1990s. The aim of the current study has been to evaluate the hypotheses put forward about the origin and cause of the infants' deaths—due to natural causes, infanticides or ritual sacrifices—which so far have been based on ethnographic and indirect data. The UAB research team has recovered and reviewed all the existing archaeological documentation and re-studied the funerary context. Updated techniques of morphology, morphometry and, for the first time, genetic analysis and dental histology have been applied to the skeletal remains in order to trace their complete biological profile. All the remains of the infants recovered so far, which come from two nuclei of the site, Illa d'en Reixac and Puig de Sant Andreu, have been studied. A total of 15 individuals were analysed, one of which has been identified for the first time in this research.
“Our study addresses infant burials in prehistory with a multidisciplinary approach and a level of depth and analytical detail that has not been done before. Biological analyses allowed us to obtain the age and sex of the infants and to delve deeper into possible causes of death. We thus move from theories to evidence. The archaeological study, on the other hand, tells us about a practice intimately associated with the domestic sphere, which roots these infants in the social sphere of the living,” says Assumpció Malgosa, professor of Biological Anthropology at the UAB and coordinator of the study.
Sex, age, cause of death and possible kinship
The study shows that eight of the infants studied were girls and five were boys—in the two remaining individuals it was not possible to perform a genetic analysis—and that some of the burials were of premature deaths, during gestation. Fundamentally, however, they were of full-term fetuses and individuals with a postnatal survival of more than one month—the infants that lived the longest were twelve weeks old.
“The pattern of distribution of deaths by age and sex that we have identified is similar to natural infant mortality in developing populations, and leads us to rule out that there was a selection by sex or sacrificial practices, as had been previously suggested,” says Carolina Sandoval, researcher at the UAB and first author of the article. “As for the age and pattern of natural death, the results strongly evidence what we had already pointed out in a recent study on Iberian infant teeth, six of which belonged to children from Ullastret,” she adds.
Only two of the individuals studied, located in the same deposit, shared a mitochondrial lineage, which could suggest a maternal link. Even so, given that the genetic variant identified is very frequent in the population, it was not possible to confirm this link with certainty.
Infants of both sexes remained at home
The taphonomic study and the archaeological documentation confirm that all individuals were buried in domestic spaces, some with a small portico that would have served as a storage area, a space for the transformation of household food or craft work. These data rule out the hypothesis put forward in the previous study, in which two burials from Puig de Sant Andreu were interpreted as ritual deposits around an altar.
“None of the burials are found in the palatial or aristocratic buildings of large dimensions excavated. Most were simple, consisting of small pits without liners or coverings and some with associated fauna,” says Gabriel de Prado, head of the MAC-Ullastret.
“All this points to the family ritual character of the burials and shows us a very intimate part of the Iberian society, who without differentiating by sex want their babies to stay in the houses”, emphasises Carolina Sandoval.
The research team also detected the reuse of the graves in two of the cases studied. In addition, the fact that there were four burials from different phases of occupation of the settlement in the same sector and that avoided the previous burials suggests that the inhabitants were aware of the existence of these spaces.
Skeletal remains of a girl (ULL 06) who survived childbirth and died at about two weeks of age, and her burial pit, in the Illa d'en Reixac (Iberian city of Ullastret). © UAB – MAC. Below: the remains of the Iberian infants from Ullastret have been conditioned in the Biological Anthropology Laboratory of the UAB in order to preserve them. © UAB.
A site with much still to be excavated
The Ullastret site, in the Girona town of the same name, is one of the most outstanding archaeological sites of the Iron Age in the Iberian Peninsula (second half of the first millennium BC). Belonging to the Iberian culture, its relevance lies in being the largest Iberian oppidum (fortified city) discovered in Catalonia and one of the most significant in the western Mediterranean.
“The Iberian population cremated their dead, but still very little is known about other social and ritual practices, such as those directly involving infants. That is why multidisciplinary and comprehensive research like this is fundamental, particularly in a site as emblematic and important as Ullastret,” emphasises Carolina Sandoval.
The study provides a more contextualised understanding of the infant burials at the site and offers new perspectives on the funerary practices and living conditions of this Iberian community.
In the Iberian city of Ullastret, however, there is still much research to be done. “The review of the materials and the global analysis we did suggests that the expected number of child burials throughout the site could be spectacular, especially considering that some pits were reused,” says Assumpció Malgosa. At the moment, approximately 5% has been excavated at Illa d'en Reixac and 20% at Puig de Sant Andreu.
The remains of the infants were studied at the Biological Anthropology Laboratory of the UAB, where the research team also carried out the conditioning in order to preserve them.
The research was recently published in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria. The researchers are also studying the remains of infants buried in other Iberian sites in Catalonia.
Link to the article published in Trabajos de Prehistoria and reference article:
https://tp.revistas.csic.es/index.php/tp/article/view/959
Sandoval-Ávila, C., Martirosyan, A., Cuesta-Aguirre, D. R., Jordana, X., Nociarová, D., Prado, G. de, Santos, C. y Malgosa, A. (2024). Muerte infantil en época ibérica: el complejo arqueológico de Ullastret (Girona, Cataluña Trabajos de Prehistoria, 81 (2): 959. DOI: 10.3989/tp