Moments of Memory and Belonging: A Special Child Burial from Neolithic Ba`ja, Southern Jordan

Child burials of Early Neolithic communities in the Near East have, with few exceptions, rarely been the focus of in-depth investigations in Near Eastern prehistory (see Poulmarc’h 2008; Benz 2012; for a bio-anthropological perspective see Bocaege 2015; Gresky et al. 2018; Resch and Gresky 2018; Tibbetts 2017). This is surprising because social identities and structures are considered to have changed considerably when groups started to live permanently in large scale communities (e.g. Alt et al. 2013; Benz 2010; Benz et al. 2017; Gebel 2002a; Goring-Morris 2005; Kuijt 2000). The roles ascribed to children possibly changed too when people started to