Burials provide fascinating insights into past cultures for archaeologists. While we might assume on the basis of our own experiences that everyone always buried their dead, this is not so! Burials varied remarkably over time, from culture to culture, and according to status. In fact, burial of any kind is a relatively recent phenomenon with only a handful of rare individuals being buried in Neanderthal times (32,000-150,000 years ago) and none before that time. For the entire Upper Paleolithic (32,000-10,000 years ago), there are only about 200 burials known. This is a paltry number considering the millions of people that lived in Eurasia over 20,000 years ago. Why were there so few burials and what determined who was buried?
Before venturing into this issue, it is important to point out that there are major differences of interpretations by archaeologists as to the nature of Upper Paleolithic society. Some maintain that all societies of the Upper Paleolithic were egalitarian, while others (myself included) argue that there were important social and economic inequalities at least in some resource-rich areas. Burials provide some of the most important evidence in these arguments.
The mere fact that few people were buried in the Upper Paleolithic indicates that only people or families with special status were buried. Perhaps they were powerful leaders or at least were being promoted by rich kinship groups as their powerful ancestors. But many of the burials were of children, which makes such explanations unlikely.
A more likely explanation is based on ethnographic observations such as those from the Northwest Coast of North America where slaves were not buried; their bodies were simply thrown on refuse heaps or into the ocean. It was the elites who were buried or given other special treatments by placing bodies in special boxes or caves.
In addition, in the Upper Paleolithic a number of people were buried with richly ornamented clothing. The most notable example was at Sungir in the Ukraine where an adult male and two adolescent children were buried with over 10,000 ivory beads altogether (apparently sewn onto clothing), plus ivory spears, ivory disks, and ivory bracelets. All of this represented well over 9,000 hours of labor to make. This demonstrates an extraordinary control over labor since the children certainly could not have produced these beads themselves, and the adult doubtfully could have either. There are few clearer examples of inequality in the Paleolithic record. But this is not the only example.
At La Madeleine, a child was almost covered with over 1,000 Dentalium shells that had to have been brought from the coast, hundreds of kilometers away. Dentalium shells are tusk shaped, only 2-3 centimeters in length, and live several meters beneath the sea so that they were difficult to obtain and were therefore valuable. On the Northwest Coast, they were used as money, and their rate of exchange (at distances from the sea comparable to that of La Madeleine) was one and a half dried salmon per shell. So, the boy at La Madeleine was buried with an equivalent worth of about 1,500 dried salmon–a very substantial amount.
Other child burials with copious numbers of shells occurred at the Grotte des Enfants and Arene Candide. Such wealth buried with children is certainly an indication of inequalities in the Upper Paleolithic in my view. This is one of the reasons why I portrayed some Ice Age families as being rich and others poor, some powerful and others subservient, in my adventure story for young adults: The Eyes of the Leopard which takes place in France, 20,000 years ago.
Burials provide fascinating clues about the nature of past and present societies. It is really only with the Mesolithic and Neolithic (in the last 10,000 years) that burials become more common, and really only with more complex societies that burials became almost universal. You might ask yourself why. Was it due to an increase in intelligence? A change in beliefs or cultural traditions? Or changes in the social and economic importance of kinship groups or individuals, or other factors? These are questions that many archaeologists wrestle with.