Children will be children, whether they are alive today or 4,500 years ago. When instructed to make pottery vessels for the use of adults, kids who were living in Tel Hama – a town at the edge of the Ebla Kingdom, one of the most important Syrian kingdoms in the Early Bronze Age – brightened their day in their free time by making tiny figurines as toys and miniature vessels for themselves, without the interference or involvement of adults.
“These children taught each other to make miniature figurines and vessels, without the involvement of the adults,” suggested archaeologist and art historian Dr. Akiva Sanders, a Dan David Fellow at the Entin Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University (TAU).
“It’s safe to say that they [the artifacts] were created by children – and probably included those skilled children from the cup-making workshops. It seems that in these figurines the children expressed their creativity and their imagination.”
Archaeologists at TAU and the National Museum in Copenhagen analyzed 450 such pieces of pottery and found that two-thirds of the vessels were made by children, some as young as seven and eight years old. Along with the use of children for the needs of the kingdom, they also found evidence of the children’s independent creations outside the industrial framework, which illustrate the spark of childhood even in early urban societies.
THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS have just published their findings in the international journal Children in the Past under the title “Child and Clay: Fingerprints of a Dual Engagement at Hama, Syria.”
“Our research allows us a rare glimpse into the lives of children who lived in the area of the Ebla Kingdom, one of the oldest kingdoms in the world.
“We discovered that at its peak, roughly from 2400 -2000 BCE, the cities associated with the kingdom began to rely on child labor for the industrial production of pottery,” Sanders explained.
“They worked in workshops starting at the age of seven and were specially trained to create cups as uniformly as possible for use in the kingdom in everyday life and at royal banquets.”
A person’s fingerprints don’t change throughout their life. For this reason, the size of the palm can be roughly deduced by measuring the density of the margins of the fingerprint and from the size of the palm. The age and sex of the person can also be estimated.
The excavation took place in the 1930s
The pottery from Tel Hama was excavated in the 1930s, and since then has been kept in the National Museum in Denmark. From a contemporary analysis of the fingerprints of the pottery, it appears that most of them were made by children. In the city of Hama, two-thirds of the pottery was made by children, and the rest was created by older men.
“At the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, some of the world’s first city-kingdoms arose in the Levant and Mesopotamia,” the authors wrote. “We wanted to use the fingerprints on the pottery to understand how processes such as urbanization and the centralization of government functions affected the demographics of the ceramic industry.
“In the town of Hama, an ancient center for the production of ceramics, we initially see potters around the age of 12 and 13, with half the potters being under 18, and with boys and girls in equal proportions. This statistic changes with the formation of the Kingdom of Ebla when we see that potters were starting to produce more goblets for banquets. And since more and more alcohol-fueled feasts were held, the cups were frequently broken, so more cups needed to be made.”
Not only did the kingdom begin to rely increasingly on child labor, but the children were taught to make the cups as similar to each other as possible. This phenomenon is also seen in the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America: It is very easy to control children and teach them specific movements to create standardization in handicrafts,” the archaeologists wrote.
BUT WHEN the cat’s away, the mice will play – the kids made their own pottery vessels in their free time and in their own chosen images.
“Childhood is a time of life, like any other, in which the influence wielded by others is complex and multivocal. This multivocality is clear in the contemporary world, but it is not easy to recognize in archaeological contexts.
This contribution argues that recently published fingerprint data from the Hama period provides evidence for marked tension between two types of engagement with clay that took place in the lives of young potters at the site – learning to produce full-scale ceramics on the one hand and learning to produce miniature vessels and figurines on the other. This tension extended to the nature of the skills that were being learned, the values being transmitted, and the types of social bonds that were formed or undermined,” Sanders said.
“I begin, like so many others, with a nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood,” he explained.
“Was it not wonderful when we spent our days in school, knowing clearly what was expected from us, what we needed to do to succeed, and not giving care about anything else? Of course, in reality, it was not so simple. The different adults in our lives pulled us in numerous different directions, and even our parents (if we had two parents that were present) could only thinly veil their disagreements on what our lives should look like – let alone what the other children had to say about it.
“Nostalgia clouds our perceptions of our own childhood, flattening its bumps into a narrative we can both long for and honor. It also clouds our perceptions of the complexities of what it means to live as a child more broadly. Recent archaeological ethnographic studies dealing with children have begun to retell the story of childhood with these complexities reconstituted. They have stressed the of what it means to be a child across time, space, and social categories, and how being a child has differed from being an adult.”
In particular, the studies have drawn attention to the diversity of ways in which children have created their own social and physical worlds, as well as the ages at which they have taken on tasks associated with adults and adulthood.
However, among this diversity, two themes in the experience of childhood are clear – being a child as a part of a dynamic social world of children and as a process of taking on the roles given by adults. There were tensions between these two ways of being a child, and the multivocality of experience that these tensions can create, considering evidence from fingerprints on ceramics and figurines from the Early Bronze Age occupation at Hama, Syria.
TO ILLUSTRATE the potential tensions between these roles, Sanders turned to the recently globalized tradition of school education.
“Contemporary schools around the world exhibit a great deal of diversity in available resources, philosophies of teaching, internal organization, and numerous other features, but they generally can be characterized by a duality in the ways that children learn and become socialized within them. On the one hand, teachers instruct students according to a planned and standardized body of knowledge. Teachers encourage the memorization of this body of knowledge and socialize students through the instilling of social hierarchies and disciplining students whose actions are judged to be outside of the limits of acceptable behavior.
“On the other hand, school also serves as a place where students are socialized by their peers. Students learn information by observing the behavior of others to forge a social community characterized by friendship and mutual support and avoid ostracism and humiliation. The information that is communicated by peers does not generally conform to a specific body of knowledge, and in many cases, it is improvisation or playing with perceived limits that are rewarded by peer approval. However, at times, the pressures felt by a child or adolescent from peers, to conform to perceived norms of behavior, can be no less acute than those promoted by teachers,” he continued.
Some recent assessments have stressed that these two types of learning environments, epitomized in the classroom and the playground, respectively, reinforce one another in creating well-adjusted and productive members of society.
On the other hand, socialization promoted by teachers is often in conflict with that of student peers are. “Youth culture” is repeatedly blamed for encouraging behavior and life choices that are seen as short-sighted or outside of the norms of behavior in the adult world,” Sanders explained.
“In fact, despite claims that ‘youth culture’ as such has only a recent history – the idea that adolescent peers can encourage the transmission of the wrong types of information, routines, or values has a deep past.
“In this vein, the first book of Kings (12:6-10) narrates that the short-sighted promise of oppression given to a coalition of northern tribal leaders by king Rehoboam [grandson of king David, son of king Solomon and the first monarch of the Kingdom of Judah after the split of the united Kingdom of Israel] was given because he ignored the opinions of his older advisers in favor of the advice of the peers he grew up with. In this case, the text takes for granted that there were two distinct groups, which we can compare to teachers and peers, who each had the ability to transmit their values to him and that these sets of values were in conflict. In the context of the wider story about the rebellion of the northern tribes against the authority of the Jerusalem monarchy, this decision to value peer knowledge over teacher knowledge is credited with causing the entire bloody conflict.”
The teachers in the apprenticeship relationships at Hama could not have been old enough to be the apprentice’s parents, the authors suggested.
“When an apprentice is not trained by his own parent, the teacher can generally impose a much stricter discipline regime, increasing the potential severity of punishments for deviations from the teacher’s templates. Indeed, the regularity of ceramic forms at Hama particularly goblets, is striking. This feature suggests that fidelity to template was a high priority when teaching young potters, and the development of skills that were applicable in a wider range of situations,” Sanders concluded.