The research team, led by Mina Amzirkov of the University of Belgrade together with colleagues in Vienna and Kikinda, focused on two necropolises: Mokrin and Ostojićevo, both located near the town of Kikinda in the Banat region of northern Serbia. The Maros culture, which flourished across parts of present-day Hungary, Romania, and northern Serbia between roughly 2700 and 1500 cal. BC and peaked around 2000 BC, is famous among archaeologists for its highly normative funerary ritual. Adults were buried as individual inhumations in a flexed position, lying on either the left or right side, with bodies and grave pits aligned along a north-south axis. Decades of study of adult skeletons established the code: males were placed on their left side with the head to the north, producing a north-south orientation, while females were placed on their right side with the head to the south, producing a south-north orientation. In both cases the face was turned toward the east.

What remained unknown until now was whether children followed the same prescriptions. That question has been extraordinarily difficult to answer because estimating the biological sex of immature skeletons from bone morphology is notoriously unreliable. The sexual characteristics that anthropologists rely on in adult remains — features of the pelvis, the skull, and other bones — simply have not developed in children. Combined with a historical lack of scholarly interest in the youngest members of past communities, this methodological barrier meant that the gender roles of Bronze Age boys and girls remained essentially a blank page, filled mostly by assumption rather than evidence.

The breakthrough came from a technique that has rapidly become the gold standard for archaeological sex estimation: peptide-based sex identification from dental enamel. The method targets amelogenin, an enamel protein encoded by genes on both the X and Y chromosomes. Sexually dimorphic fragments of this protein survive in tooth enamel for millennia and can be detected by ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. The presence of both Amelogenin X and Y peptides indicates a genetic male; the presence of X without Y indicates a genetic female. Because tooth enamel forms in early childhood and is the hardest tissue in the human body, the method works even on poorly preserved juvenile remains where skeletal morphology fails entirely — and it requires only minimally invasive sampling.

Applying this technique, the team determined the biological sex of 77 non-adult individuals aged from around 9 to 12 months up to 18 to 22 years, buried at the two cemeteries. For 76 of them, sex was established through enamel peptide analysis; for one individual, previously published ancient DNA results were used. The researchers then compared each child’s biologically determined sex with two key elements of the Maros funerary norm: the orientation of the body along the north-south or south-north axis, and the side on which the body was placed. The statistical analysis, using Fisher’s exact test and Cramer’s V as a measure of association strength, produced striking results.

At Mokrin, a necropolis first excavated in the 1960s that yielded 312 graves and was in use between roughly 2100 and 1800 BC, the association between biological sex and body orientation was overwhelmingly strong, with a Cramer’s V of 0.80 and a p-value below 0.001. The association with body position was moderate but still statistically significant, with a Cramer’s V of 0.56 — a figure partly explained by the many skeletons whose position could not be determined due to poor preservation. At Ostojićevo, a smaller but even clearer dataset of 16 to 17 individuals from the site’s Early Bronze Age horizon, the correlations approached perfection: Cramer’s V reached 1.0 for both orientation and position, with no males placed on the right side and no females on the left. In plain terms, boys were buried like adult men — oriented north-south, on their left side — and girls were buried like adult women — oriented south-north, on their right side.

The exceptions are as revealing as the rule. Fewer than 10 percent of the children deviated from the norm. At Mokrin, six graves stood out: in graves 25, 103, and 236, peptide analysis showed that boys had been buried according to the female norm with their heads to the south, and the same pattern appeared in grave 220, where sex had been determined by ancient DNA. Conversely, graves 216 and 238 contained girls buried in the male orientation with their heads to the north — yet in those two cases, the body position matched the peptide-determined sex perfectly. The authors consider several explanations. Poor skeletal preservation visible in the field photographs of some graves may have led excavators to record the orientation incorrectly. In other cases, the deviations may represent genuinely socially meaningful exceptions. Notably, none of the exceptional burials contained gender-typical grave goods, and the children’s graves in general were less well equipped than those of adults.

The Serbian findings align closely with earlier work elsewhere in Central Europe. At the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Franzhausen I in Lower Austria, peptide-based sex identification of 75 children aged between 0 and 12 years showed that 62 of 63 individuals with determinable archaeological gender classification matched their biological sex — a concordance of 98.4 percent, with a single exception of a 4-to-5-year-old female buried in male position. A companion study of adults at Franzhausen I and the nearby cemetery of Gemeinlebarn F found that most apparent mismatches between osteological sex and burial treatment stemmed from errors in morphological sex estimation or documentation rather than genuine gender variance. Together, these studies suggest that the strong alignment between biological sex and gendered burial treatment was a widespread feature of Early Bronze Age societies in the region.

The results feed directly into a lively theoretical debate about the nature of gender in European prehistory. Some scholars have argued that the Neolithic was characterized by a fluid, situational “contextual gender,” with rigid binary identities emerging only in the Bronze Age; others counter that prehistoric gender was always diverse and context-dependent, varying across time, space, age, and social circumstance. A large-scale study of 1,252 individuals from Central European burials found that while the binary model accounted for roughly 90 percent of cases, a small minority showed non-binary or contradictory sex-gender combinations, which the authors interpreted as a socially acknowledged minority rather than mere error. The Maros data add a crucial new dimension to this discussion by demonstrating that, in at least one well-documented cultural sphere, binary gender was not an adult achievement but a social fact recognized from early childhood.

There are also poignant gaps in the picture. No burials of children under two years were identified at Mokrin, and while settlement evidence suggests infants were sometimes interred within settlements, the documented number falls far short of demographic expectations — hinting at alternative practices, possibly including water or sky burials, that have left little archaeological trace. Children’s graves were also typically shallower than adult ones, making them more vulnerable to destruction by agriculture and soil processes, which explains the poor preservation that long obscured this research. What survives, however, is unambiguous: a shared mortuary code, replicated across multiple communities of the Maros cultural sphere, in which females were symbolically aligned with the right side and the south, males with the left side and the north. In death as in life, Bronze Age children were already boys and girls in the eyes of their community — a codified, material expression of gender that endured for centuries along the banks of the Tisa River.

Subject of Research: Gendered funerary practices of children in the Bronze Age Maros culture of northern Serbia, determined through peptide-based sex identification of dental enamel

Article Title: Growing into gender: Funerary practice of boys and girls in the Bronze Age Maros culture (2100 − 1700 BC)

Article References: Amzirkov, M., Porčić, M., Rebay-Salisbury, K., Kanz, F., Wolf, M., Gavrilović, M. K., & Stefanović, S. (2026). Growing into gender: Funerary practice of boys and girls in the Bronze Age Maros culture (2100 − 1700 BC). Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(11), Article 216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02578-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02578-3

Keywords: Bronze Age, Maros culture, gender archaeology, children, burial practices, amelogenin peptides, dental enamel, Mokrin, Ostojićevo, Serbia, mass spectrometry, biological sex