This 9,000

Discovered in a Neolithic burial in Jordan, the elaborate piece of jewelry reflected the importance of its young owner.

In 2018, archaeologists excavating a burial site in southern Jordan made an extraordinary find: thousands of beads fashioned from amber, turquoise, sea shells, and other materials, along with an elaborately engraved mother-of-pearl ring and a hematite pendant.

The discovery was made in the village of Ba’ja, where farmers and herders lived between 7,400 and 6,800 B.C. Archaeologists have been working there since 1997 in hopes of learning more about its Neolithic inhabitants, including their social structures, crafts, and architecture.

Now, after five years of study, researchers have not only reconstructed the beads into their original form—a multi-stand necklace—but have also gained a better understanding of its owner: an 8-year-old child who bore the intricate jewelry fashioned from more than 2,500 beads. An international team led by Syrian-French archaeologist Hala Alarashi recently published their analysis of the necklace, now on display at Jordan’s Petra Museum, in the journal Plos One.

Archaeologists have found other body ornaments in the ancient graves of children and adults at Ba’ja and other sites in the Near East, including in Syria and Turkey. But Alarashi says she’s never encountered one quite this elaborate or complex. The different types of beads—which are tubular, flat, or disc-shaped—are nearly identical in size and form, which suggests a highly skilled person or group used specialized tools to create them, she says.

Some of the beads are made of locally available materials, while others would have come from far-flung locales like shells the Red Sea, some 60 miles to the south, and turquoise likely sourced from the Sinai Peninsula 150 miles away. And since the community of Ba’ja inhabited a remote and rugged site in the mountains near Petra, this raises questions about how and why the group would have sourced such materials, says Alarashi, who is affiliated with the Spanish National Research Council and Côte d’Azur University. “It’s a mystery,” she says. “Despite their geographical and topographical isolation, they are extremely well connected.”

The beads present other puzzles, too. For instance, some appear to have been newly made at the time of the burial, while others were already well worn. “These differences mean something, but we don’t know what yet,” says Alarashi. “Who gave the used beads to this child? Maybe at the occasion of death, the elder of this child gave or participated in the creation of the necklace by giving their own old beads. Or maybe they gave the child the beads at birth.”

From the necklace and the complexity of the burial structure itself, archaeologists determined that the child—of undetermined sex—enjoyed high social status within their community. The burial was likely a “very important and emotional” moment for the group, one that may have also facilitated a period of reconciliation or negotiation between community members, says Alarashi. “These occasions of deep sorrow or moments of deep respect, that is the perfect time to resolve any tension or conflict,” she says. “We think the necklace and the burial played an additional role in this sense.”

Because jewelry was often made of perishable materials such as wood, seeds, leather, or plant fibers that degrade over time—and because time and resources are limited at dig sites—archaeologists are just beginning to understand the significance and prevalence of body adornments among Neolithic and earlier societies. (The oldest known jewelry, unearthed in Morocco’s Bizmoune Cave from 2014 to 2017, is around 150,000 years old.)

But, in the future, Alarashi hopes to be able to learn even more about ancient societies by comparing jewelry across sites and periods. “Beads are a communication system,” she says. “Especially in pre-literature societies, people were communicating through shapes, types, forms, colors, and combinations. They are more than just decorative—they also give information about the people, their identities, their beliefs.”