Mors immatura nel mondo piceno: conoscenze attuali e prospettive di ricerca

The sub-adult burials and their rituality have never been subject of a specific study for the pre-roman necropolises of the Marche region. This kind of research is made difficult by the lack of anthropological studies for most of the necropolises. Moreover, the current knowledges are not uniform from the diachronic and the synchronic point of view, because of the fragmentation of the edited data and the loss of a lot of information related to the 19th -20th excavations. Nevertheless, the recent archaeological campaigns and the ongoing researches permit to present interesting news regarding the social role of the children and their funeral rituality in the Picenum. Analysing 54 necropolises in 32 localities, it is possible to register a progressive growth of the number of sub-adult burials from the 9th century BC to the beginning of the 3rd century BC. During the 9th-8th centuries BC, the infants and the children were rarely buried in the necropolis of the community, and the percentage of sub-adult graves do not exceed the 20-25%. Only in the 6th-5th centuries BC the percentage of the 50% is reached, according with the infant mortality rate of the pre-industrial societies. The attention for the infant death raises during the centuries. If in the 9th-8th centuries many sub-adults do not have grave goods, in the 7th-6th centuries some infants burials show symbols of high social status and they participate to the richness ostentation of their aristocratic clans. In many sub-adult tombs, the grave goods consist of a complete banquet set, which reproduce the adult grave goods in a small size. This phenomenon of “miniaturisation” is also applied on the objects that reveal the gender, such as spears and whorls. At the same time, between the 6th and the 4th centuries BC, the presence of feeders in some tombs highlight the early age of the deceased. During the 5th-4th centuries, the funeral rituality changes considerably, and it is now focused on the association of a drinking vase and a pouring one. Moreover, some grave goods seem to suggest a greater attention to the religious aspects related to the afterlife. This is the case of the busts and the statuettes of Kore, Demeter and Aphrodite related to the rites of passage and the rebirth belief. The manifestation of these new cults and the attention on the body care reveal a strong Greek influence in the Picenian society during the 5th-4th centuries.