From the Sunghir Children to the Romito Dwarf

Figure 2. The triple burial of Dolní Věstonice (Moravia). The
specimen in the middle (Dolní Věstonice 15) is pathological.
first, found in the Romito Cave (Calabria), deserves particular
attention. The burial, dating to 11,150 150 BP (uncalibrated
14C date) (Alessio et al. 1966), includes an adolescent that
appears to be held in the left arm of an adult female (fig. 3).
The skeletons are lying parallel to a large stone with a beautiful
engraving representing a bull (Graziosi 1963; Bachechi and
Martini 2002). Romito is one of the few caves in Italy with
parietal art, and this and the additional Epigravettian burials
found there suggest that the site was probably embedded in
a ritualistic context. More important, the adolescent skeleton
(Romito 2) is abnormal, showing the typical stigmata of dwarfism.
The diagnosis is that of acromesomelic dwarfism, an
inherited autosomal recessive disorder resulting in severe
growth deficiencies, marked bowing of the forearm bones,
and frontal bulging, among other changes (Frayer et al. 1987;
Frayer, Macchiarelli, and Mussi 1988).
The meaning of the burial of the dwarf has been a matter
of debate. Frayer and coworkers (1987) stress that, despite
the physical impairments that would have been a substantial
handicap in nomadic hunting and gathering, the dwarf survived
to about 17 years of age and was buried in a selected
cave. For these reasons, they consider this burial an early
example of tolerance and care for a severely deformed individual.
Dettwyler (1991) questions this view, which is based
on the attitude towards disabled people in modern societies,
and argues that the ethnographic record points to a wide range
of reactions towards individuals perceived as “different.”
These individuals may be feared, hated, or revered. Dettwyler
concludes that we do not know whether this adolescent received
special burial treatment in spite of being a dwarf or
precisely because he was a dwarf.
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The latter possibility becomes more tenable when we take
the Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice cases into account. The three
burials share significant points: all include a pathological individual,
all are multiple burials, and all possibly include individuals
of different sexes. It could be argued that the skeletal
abnormalities exhibited by the Romito dwarf are more severe
than those affecting either Sunghir 3 or Dolní Věstonice 15,
weakening the idea of a patterned relationship between anomalous
individuals and extraordinary burial treatment. The
physical diversity of the latter individuals, however, may have
been more perceptible than is suggested by skeletal changes
alone, given that the hypothesized pathologies are frequently
associated with soft-tissue anomalies (Formicola et al. 2001;
Formicola and Buzhilova 2004).
Multiple burials raise additional questions. The phenomenon
is not restricted to pathological individuals and appears with
intriguing frequency in the Gravettian around Europe and the
Italian Epigravettian (tables 1 and 2). Additionally, whenever
sex can be confidently diagnosed, a multiple burial includes
individuals of different sexes, the only exception being the Arene
Candide burial V (Cardini 1980)—in which an adult male
is associated with a child of the same sex as determined by
DNA analyses (Tarsi et al. n.d.)—and possibly the triple burial
of Dolní Věstonice, given the uncertainty regarding the sex of
the pathological skeleton.
A multiple burial is not necessarily the result of a single
event. Depending on temperature and soil conditions, softtissue
and ligament decay may take weeks or months (Duday
et al. 1990). Thus the reopening of a burial after a time for
a further emplacement would not necessarily disturb the an-
Figure 3. The double burial from Romito Cave (Italy). The dwarf
(Romito 2) is on the right and appears to be held in the left arm
of the female individual.