TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—According to a statement released by Tel Aviv University, about two-thirds of the 4,500-year-old pottery vessels unearthed at Syria’s site of Tel Hama in the 1930s were made by children as young as seven or eight years old. The potters’ ages were determined through measuring fingerprints in the 450 pieces of pottery in the study, and using those measurements to estimate the size of the potters’ palms, and then deduce their age and sex. “The children worked in workshops starting at the age of seven, and were specially trained to create cups as uniformly as possible—which were used in the [Ebla] kingdom in everyday life and at royal banquets,” said Akiva Sanders of Tel Aviv University. The children also made tiny figurines and miniature vessels, he added. “It is safe to say that they were created by children—and probably including those skilled children from the cup-making workshops. It seems that in these figurines the children expressed their creativity and their imagination,” Sanders explained. The remaining one-third of the pottery in the study is thought to have been made by older men. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Childhood in the Past. To read about Iberian plaques that researchers believe may have been carved by children some 5,000 years ago, go to “Bird Brains.”
