When archaeologists first found that thousands of owl-shaped slate tablets were interred in archaeological sites throughout the Iberian Peninsula, they were stumped. Struggling to pinpoint any practical purpose or function for the artifacts — which were over 5,000 years old and decorated with an assortment of detailed designs — they settled on the theory that the tablets possessed some sort of ritual or symbolic significance.
Now, a new paper published in Scientific Reports in Dec. 2022 suggests that children actually carved and used these tablets as a part of their play and development. The designs on the tablets also improved in their detail and delicacy as the children's carving abilities advanced.
“Children’s object play, and the objects themselves, [have] been disregarded in the archaeological literature until recently,” the authors assert in their paper. “Therefore, owl-like objects made in stone provide perhaps one of the few glimpses [of] childhood behavior in the archaeological record of ancient Europe.”
