The Iberians already practiced perinatal mourning in the first millennium BC.

BarcelonaThe Iberians They buried their children in the pavement of their homes because they wanted to remember them. In theIn October, a study by the UAB, UVic-UCC and the Synchrotron was published. which analyzed the baby teeth of 45 children, and ruled out that these babies buried in homes were infanticides or sacrifices. Now, a new multidisciplinary study by the UAB, in collaboration with the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia, which has analyzed the remains of 15 children from the Empordà site of Ullastret (Illa d'en Reixac and Puig de Sant Andreu), provides new data. "All the burials were in the corners, never in passageways, and we have found spaces where a baby was buried and, almost a century later, another was buried. Therefore, there is a survival of memory. Furthermore, they never destroyed previous burials," says Gabriel del Prado, head of the MAC-Ullastret, Gabriel del Prado. "They buried them in the spaces where they lived and, therefore, there is respect and a desire to remember them," he adds.

The ritual must have been quite intimate because none of the burials are found in large palatial or aristocratic buildings. Instead, they were quite simple: they consisted of small, unlined graves or roofs, always in the homes where the family lived or worked. "Everything points to the family ritual nature of the burials and shows us a very intimate part of Iberian society, which wanted its babies, regardless of gender, to stay in the homes," highlights UAB predoctoral researcher Carolina Sandoval.

More than half a century of excavations

The remains of the Ullastret babies have been excavated since the 1950s, and the latest anthropological studies date back to the 1990s. The UAB research team has recovered and reviewed all existing archaeological documentation and re-examined the funerary context. Updated morphology, morphometry, genetic analysis, and dental histology techniques have been applied to the skeletal remains to establish their complete biological profile. "We can't know what the Iberians who buried babies at home felt, but they did want them to stay there and become part of the memory of the place," explains Asunción Malgosa, a researcher with the Biological Anthropology Research Group (GREAB) at the UAB. "We've reviewed all the documentation. You could say we need to create a new one."

Eight of the babies studied were girls and five were boys (genetic analysis was not possible for the remaining two individuals), and they were of diverse ages: some fetuses were 24 weeks old, and the oldest baby was three months old. The study provides further evidence of what was already suggested by the previous study in which baby teeth were analyzed. "The pattern of distribution of deaths by age and sex that we identified resembles natural infant mortality in developing populations, and leads us to rule out any gender selection or sacrificial practices," Sandoval emphasizes.

The Ullastret site, in the Girona town of the same name, is the largest oppidum Iberian (fortified city) discovered in Catalonia and one of the most important in the western Mediterranean. "There's still a lot of searching to do," says Sandoval. So far, approximately 5% of the excavation has been completed on Reixac Island and 20% on Puig de Sant Andreu. For researchers, these studies open the door to future research because the number of infant burials at the entire site could be spectacular. Furthermore, very little study of the Iberian remains has been possible because the culture practiced cremation of the dead. The infant remains have been studied in the laboratory of the Biological Anthropology Unit. from the UAB, where the research team also carried out their conditioning to preserve them. The research has been published in the journal Prehistory Works.