Child Buried in Neolithic Jordan With Stunning Jewelry, Archaeologists Deduce

More than 2,500 beads found on a young girl turn out to have been an extraordinary multi-row neck ornament, which contained exotic imported stuffs

Around 9,000 years ago in southern Jordan, a young girl died and was buried in a crouched position on her left side with what turned out to be around 2,500 beads.

The beads were found mainly lying on the child’s neck and chest. Most were fashioned from local limestone but some were made of exotic imported seashells and turquoise, report archaeologists investigating the burial in the Neolithic village of Ba’ja.

The girl, estimated to have died at about age 8, also had a delicately engraved mother-of-pearl ring found lying on her chest and a double-perforated stone buckle, Hala Alarashi and colleagues reported in PLOS ONE last week. The child’s remains had been discovered in 2018 during excavations under the auspices of the Household and Death Project from the Free University of Berlin, which was funded by the German Research Foundation.

Their purpose in the new paper: to reconstruct the girl’s adornments and consider its significance at the time: the pre-pottery Neolithic B period. because this was definitely no mere child’s collection of fripperies. The beads had been part of an elaborately crafted multilayer necklace studded with imported precious stones. The mother-of-pearl ring (a circle, not a jewel for the finger) was the necklace’s centerpiece.

Altogether, the adornment has aesthetic, artisanal and socioeconomic implications for Neolithic society in southern Jordan, says the team.

Extraordinary finery has been found in ancient burials before. Two children were found in Sunghir, Russia, from 34,000 years ago with heaps of grave goods – including more than 10,000 beads made of mammoth tusks. Beads made of animal bone have been found in the context of the Natufian culture in Israel. But nothing like this child’s finery has been found in the Neolithic Levant before.

So, burial with grave goods has been going on for tens of thousands of years. But for a child this young to have been interred with such highly invested goods, she may have enjoyed distinguished position or prestige, the team surmises, before adding that she isn’t the first Neolithic child to have been found buried at Ba’ja with finery. Excavation has yielded other spectacular ornaments in some children’s graves at Ba’ja in recent years, some just as complex as this girl’s neckpiece.

But not all. “Infants without any grave goods were buried in the same building [as this child],” co-author Marion Benz says by email, and that indicates that the child’s position may not have been a function of the household.

Stained red

The village at Ba’ja was big, possibly housing as many as 600 people, and dates to about 9,400 to 8,800 years ago – the cusp of the agricultural revolution in the region. That makes it one of the earliest settlements in the region, though others from that time and just as big or even bigger are known from both what are today Israel and Turkey, for instance. The Neolithic settlement at Ba’ja itself was discovered in 1983, but has been under archaeological investigation since 1997.

The village is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the famed site of Petra and was densely occupied. The stone-walled homes were built near one another, and some seem to have had more than one floor. The economy was based on farming – some 80 to 90 percent of their meat seems to have come from sheep and goats, Benz explains – plus they also did some hunting and gathering, archaeologists have deduced.

The girl’s remains were found buried within a stone cist covered with several layers of glittering white sandstone slabs. Investigations by the team’s anthropologist Julia Gresky, from the German Archaeological Institute, indicate that the body was of a girl, though the determination of the child’s sex remains uncertain. The determination that she died at around age 8 is based mainly on the state of her teeth and bone morphology, Benz explains.

She was buried on her left side in the fetal position. “Her right arm is gone altogether and her vertebrae, pelvis and feet were very poorly preserved,” Gresky says.

Her bones were stained red, possibly because her skin or clothes had been pigmented with ocher. Traces of ocher were also detected on most of the beads, but that could have been due to using thread covered in the pigment, or ocher on the body and/or on the clothes, or some other funerary practice. The team adds that a lump of ocher was found by the girl’s feet.

The beads were found chiefly on her chest and neck, and it was based on very, very careful documentation of their precise locations that the team could reconstruct their original distribution.

There were multiple series of aligned beads beneath the left side of her neck, clavicula and upper ribs, indicating that the beads had been threaded and organized into multiple rows, they explain in the paper. Gravity caused the right side of the ornament to slip down. Some beads were also found in isolation, but they think this was caused by post-depositional alterations due to the decaying corpse.

The team had considered whether the beads might have belonged to a beaded garment rather than a neck ornament. But after reconstructing the sequence of beads (not unlike sequencing DNA in approach), plus mathematical analyses to estimate the lengths of these chains, the team concluded that this was no designer dress.

“This distribution indicated that the beads were meant to adorn the upper part of the child’s chest and the neck; that is, they were not part of other ornament types such as headdress, coiffe or diadem,” they write.

Exotic amber

What sort of beads were they? Some disc, some tubular. Over 2,200 of them were stone, including exotica such as five disc beads made of semi-precious turquoise. Around 240 were made of imported mollusks: saltwater clams and conus sea snails. The center ring was made of saltwater pearl mussels with gorgeous nacreous innards.

The village was about 150 kilometers from the Red Sea. Yet the archaeologists believe the shell beads weren’t necessarily imported: it seems the raw materials were and the beads were fashioned in Ba’ja itself, though the team didn’t find many of the minerals identified for the necklace in the form of raw or unfinished items at the site. But the team hails the consistency in manufacture (though no “workshop” has been identified yet). The process for stone and shell beads alike was the same: shaping, drilling, then finishing, the team says.

Even the tubular beads were made this way: first shaped, then drilled, indicative of supreme craftsmanship – a great achievement if not a unique one. As team member Alarashi points out, a similar practice was detected at the Neolithic site of Çayönü Tepesi in southeastern Turkey, which also featured crowded stone housing by the way.

Regarding the drilling, similar to the way some tunnels may be built today, the beads were drilled from both sides: “The alignment of drillings is indicative of experience and skills of the bead-makers. Indeed, turning the bead and drilling it from the opposite side to meet the end of the first drilling perfectly is a complex procedure.” It took a craftsperson, no question.

And for the first time in the history of archaeological investigation of the Neolithic Levant, the archaeologists found beads made of amber, the origin of which is uncertain – there is some in the southern Levant, but the team cannot be sure. They add that the amber didn’t preserve well and the ornament may have contained more amber beads than has been presently identified.

Intriguingly, the limestone beads are of relatively standard shape and outline, which is consistent with batch processing, the team suggests. This is not so for the turquoise beads, though – they are irregular in shape, which may speak more to the challenges thrown up by the mineral than poor craft.

Apropos turquoise, the greenish-blue stone isn’t found in Jordan either but in the Negev, Sinai and Arabia. Where these particular ones came from has yet to be investigated (by analysis).

The Neolithic aesthetic

The double-perforated pendant was found behind the girl’s neck. It was made of dark gray hematite (as were two of the beads) – but actually it apparently served as a buckle to hang strings of beads behind the neck, they suggest.

The team devoted much thought to how many rows of beads the necklace might have had and suggest the most “balanced” possibility is 14. The few turquoise beads seem to have served to offset the predominant colors of white and red, providing “dynamic visual effect,” the team writes.

The reconstruction of the necklace with its mother-of-pearl central ring was enabled by the vast efforts of Andrea Fischer and Alice Burkhardt from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart.

The accomplished restoration project shows that the necklace was a spectacular piece of art. As art does, it likely fulfilled social and cultural functions, indicating something about the wearers and/or manufacturers. They may have had aesthetic rules; the necklace seems to have been symmetrical. The team feels it evokes a sense of harmony by means of its radial curvilinear structure and strategic distribution of the beads and other components to reveal their beauty and qualities. Possibly, the material for the beads was not selected randomly or for sheer beauty alone, but also to express intangible values – most notably “abundancy, diversity and exclusivity.”

They also point out that while beads weren’t a Neolithic innovation and neither were necklaces or even double-perforated necklace buckles, drilling holes through dense materials such as hard stones like carnelian and shell bulks to create tubular beads appears to be a Neolithic creation.

Benz also points out that some of the children in Ba’ja were buried without grave goods and were “squeezed” into simple pits, while others were lavishly decorated with either garments or accoutrements such as belts, onto which beads had been sewn and/or with ornaments.

“We also think that there must have been other burial rituals that left no traces or hardly any traces, as we found a few isolated human bones within the settlement and in the siq [gorge],” she adds. The archaeologists don’t think this village society necessarily had social ranks but there was definitely distinction, and this child was special.

So what have we? Mortality rates in prehistory were high and some children in Neolithic Ba’ja some 9,000 years ago, notably this one, were buried with finery that plausibly attests to a comfortable community with aesthetic values and trade or contacts with far-off places (which has been attested in other Neolithic contexts, such as obsidian from Turkey found at a Neolithic village by Jerusalem). It is fruitless to speculate at the symbolism, but the team suggests this evident richness in non-utilitarian finery indicates material wealth. Note that their burial rather than inheritance takes the beads out of circulation. This indicates that the people of Ba’ja were not losing sleep over access to resources.

Does that mean they were necessarily wealthier perched atop a canyon in southern Jordan than elsewhere in the Levant? No reason to go there. “The lack of similarly abundant beaded ornaments from other known farming Levantine villages may be due to cultural choices where other values prevail over abundance,” the team points out. They add that preservation issues might also play a role – and who knows what precious organic materials may have been placed in the graves, because if they were, they are long gone and forgotten.