Despite the obvious presence of children and infants in each and every society their role in the ancient societies was a long neglected topic in the archaeology all over the world and the Near East is no exception. The concept of childhood and infancy and the attitude towards the youngest members of human populations only became a subject of sociological and archaeological studies in the last quarter of the 20th century. Even after the attention has been drawn to the topic of children, they still hold a secondary place in the scholarly debate. Burial customs are one of the sources to study the social structure and the intra-societal relations existing in ancient societies. Due to the complexity of those social interactions as well as possible multiple interpretations of mortuary behavior, they are a delicate tool that can often lead to misconceptions and therefore using them as sources of information requires special caution. Nevertheless, material remains of the burial customs are currently the only available evidence to study the adult-infant relations of the pre- and early-historic societies. So far no comprehensive study of childhood in the early urban societies of the Near East has been conducted and it is the author's impression that children are often thought to be considered non-entities by the ancient inhabitants of the region. This con-cept seems to be rooted in the practice of burying infants under the floors of houses rather than placing them together with the deceased adults in the extramural cemeteries. The current study was aimed at refuting this notion and presenting other possible inter-pretations of the child-related mortuary behavior. The analysis of evidence available for the area of the Levant for the period be-tween 3600 and 2000 BCE has led to two main conclusions. First, that such practice was not a common or long lasting custom in this region and second, that the children-related mortuary customs lend themselves to several interpretations and the one assum-ing infants' inferiority in the ancient societies does not find much support in the exca-vated evidence. Due to limited scope of the study the focus was placed on the spatial differentiation between the adults and the children, rather then on other aspects of burial domain such as funerary gifts or specific post-mortem treatment of the body. Two different patterns of child-related burial practices has been exposed in the coastal part of the Levant and in northern Syria/south-eastern Anatolia. In neither of them evidence of treating children as non-entities was sufficient to support this concept. On the contrary, in both cases it seems that infants and children were in fact treated in very similar manners and sometimes the youngest were buried in more elaborate or 'wealthier' burials than the adults, thus disproving their suspected inferiority. In the area of the coastal Levant the differential treatment does appear at times. A strong correlation of this differentiation and the periods of urban development and decline that can be observed in Early Bronze Age Palestine, points towards a major role urbanization and overpopulation played in shaping of the mortuary traditions of the region. The same cannot be said about the Syro-Anatolian section of the Euphrates ba-sin, where an entirely different pattern can be seen. There it seem that children and in-fants were usually treated equally with the adults in terms of the grave location and often also the grave type. Therefore, the independence of mortuary behavior from the age of the deceased was suggested for that region, even though exceptions were of course found. As a result of the study, the concept of infants' inferiority was in fact refuted, but the problem of the role of children in the society was not solved as much as exposed in its full complexity. A number of aspects of the study has to be studied in greater de-tail, of which the most interesting is the exact age at death at which the mortuary treat-ment changes (in cases where id does change). Unfortunately the published data are not sufficient to facilitate this study at the moment. Funerary equipment and differences in types of graves also call for more attention in the future analysis. Lastly the wider con-textual analysis involving determination of sizes and characters of the settlements to which the burials are affiliated will surely throw new light on our understanding of the way urbanization affected the mortuary traditions.

The volume offers a comprehensive introduction to the archaeology of the southern Levant (modern day Israel, Palestine and Jordan) from the Paleolithic period to the Islamic era, presenting the past with chronological changes from hunter-gatherers to empires. Written by an international team of scholars in the fields of archaeology, epigraphy, and bioanthropology, the volume presents central debates around a range of archaeological issues, including gender, ritual, the creation of alphabets and early writing, biblical periods, archaeometallurgy, looting, and maritime trade. Collectively, the essays also engage diverse theoretical approaches to demonstrate the multi-vocal nature of studying the past. Significantly, The Social Archaeology of the Levant updates and contextualizes major shifts in archaeological interpretation.

An up-to-date, systematic depiction of Bronze Age societies of the Levant, their evolution, and their interactions and entanglements with neighboring regions.

Children, Death and Burials assembles a panorama of studies with a focus on juvenile burials; the 16 papers have a wide geographic and temporal breadth and represent a range of methodological approaches. All have a similar objective in mind, however, namely to understand how children were treated in death by different cultures in the past; to gain insights concerning the roles of children of different ages in their respective societies and to find evidence of the nature of past adult–child relationships and interactions across the life course. The contextualisation and integration of the data collected, both in the field and in the laboratory, enables more nuanced understandings to be gained in relation to the experiences of the young in the past. A broad range of issues are addressed within the volume, including the inclusion/exclusion of children in particular burial environments and the impact of age in relation to the place of children in society. Child burials clearly embody identity and ‘the domestic child’, ‘the vulnerable child’, ‘the high status child’, ‘the cherished child’, ‘the potential child’, ‘the ritual child’ and the ‘political child’, and combinations thereof, are evident throughout the narratives. Investigation of the burial practices afforded to children is pivotal to enlightenment in relation to key facets of past life, including the emotional responses shown towards children during life and in death, as well as an understanding of their place within the social strata and ritual activities of their societies. An important new collection of papers by leading researchers in funerary archaeology, examining the particular treatment of juvenile burials in the past. In particular focuses on the expression of varying status and identity of children in the funerary archaeological record as a key to understanding the place of children in different societies.

Flynn contributes to the emerging field of childhood studies in the Hebrew Bible by isolating stages of a child's life, and through a comparative perspective, studies the place of children in the domestic cult and their relationship to the deity in that cult. The study gathers data relevant to different stages of a child's life from a plethora of Mesopotamian materials (prayers, myths, medical texts, rituals), and uses that data as an interpretive lens for Israelite texts about children at similar stages such as: pre-born children, the birth stage, breast feeding, adoption, slavery, children's death and burial rituals, childhood delinquency. This analysis presses the questions of value and violence, the importance of the domestic cult for expressing the child's value beyond economic value, and how children were valued in cultures with high infant mortality rates. From the earliest stages to the moments when children die, and to the children's responsibilities in the domestic cult later in life, this study demonstrates that a child is uniquely wrapped up in the domestic cult, and in particular, is connected with the deity. The domestic-cultic value of children forms the much broader understanding of children in the ancient world, through which other more problematic representations can be tested. Throughout the study, it becomes apparent that children's value in the domestic cult is an intentional catalyst for the social promotion of YHWHism.

Animals, Ancestors, and Ritual in Early Bronze Age Syria: An Elite Mortuary Complex from Umm el-Marra, edited by Johns Hopkins professor Glenn M. Schwartz, is a final report of the excavation of Tell Umm el-Marra in northern Syria, conducted in 1994-2010. It is likely the site of ancient Tuba, capital of a small kingdom in the Early and Middle Bronze periods, in the Jabbul plain between Aleppo and northern Mesopotamia. Its study advances our understanding of early Syrian complex society beyond the big cities of Antiquity. Of particular importance in the Early Bronze excavations are the results from the site necropolis, tombs of high-ranking persons containing objects of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. Separate installations hold kungas (donkey x onager hybrids), sometimes along with human infants. This site provides the first archaeological attestation of the kunga equids, unique in the archaeology of third-millennium Syria and Mesopotamia.