Stone Age Burials in Latvia Reveal Women and Children Were Buried with Tools!
A major new study of the Zvejnieki cemetery in northern Latvia, one of the largest Stone Age burial sites in Europe, has shed light on how stone tools were used in funerary rituals. Far from being the preserve of men, these tools were just as often placed with women, children, and older individuals, overturning long-standing assumptions about prehistoric gender roles.
The cemetery at Zvejnieki was in use for over 5,000 years and contains more than 330 graves. While past research tended to focus on skeletal remains and decorative objects such as animal tooth pendants, stone artefacts had been overlooked, often dismissed as purely functional.
As part of the Stone Dead Project, led by Dr Aimée Little at the University of York, researchers applied a detailed multiproxy approach, analysing the geology, technology, function, and placement of tools within burials. This revealed that tools were not simply everyday objects. Some had been used for practical purposes such as processing animal hides, but others were intentionally created for funerary rites, in some cases broken before being laid to rest with the deceased.
Photo Credit: A. Petrović et al., PloS One (2025)
One striking finding was that children were among the most frequent recipients of stone tools in their graves. This suggests that the objects carried symbolic weight, marking identity, status, or community memory rather than reflecting day-to-day use. Women, too, were consistently buried with stone tools, contradicting the long-standing narrative that men were the sole toolmakers and hunters of the Stone Age.
As Dr Little explains, the research “overturns the old stereotype of ‘Man the Hunter’, which has dominated Stone Age studies and even shaped how archaeologists once determined the sex of infants based on the presence of stone tools.”
The study highlights the importance of examining artefacts in detail rather than making assumptions about their role. By comparing burial tools with those from settlements, and by considering them alongside other grave goods, archaeologists can build a more nuanced picture of Stone Age lives and deaths.
What emerges from Zvejnieki is the recognition that stone tools were far more than practical objects. They were central to the rituals surrounding death, tokens of memory, identity, and belief that crossed boundaries of age and gender.