An interesting custom concerning the babies of Değirmentepe in the Chalcolithic era: Tying the head

Abstract

Değirmentepe is a Chalcolithic village situated on the banks of the Euphrates within the province of Malatya (Eastern Anatolia). It has been dated by C-14 (calibrated) to the end of the seventh millenium B.P. and the beginning of the sixth millenium B.P. 31 well preserved skeletons belonging to infants and children (of which six were fetuses) were unearthed during the salvage excavations of 1978-86. It was found that three of them displayed traces of cauterization. The injury to the scalp tissues was visible on the tuber frontale of three individuals. The aim of this paper is to find the present manifestation of this thermal injury with reference to the ethnographic records in Anatolia and determine its purposes.