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Ciprian Crețu

Ciprian Crețu is an anthropologist at the Department of Paleoanthropology & Human Osteology, F. I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology, Bucharest, Romania. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Bucharest in 2021, with a dissertation focused on funerary practices at Roman and Early Byzantine Histria (2nd–7th centuries AD) which was published as a monograph three years later.

His academic journey includes a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Universitatea 1 Decembrie 1918 in Alba-Iulia, Romania (2022–2023), where he conducted research on the bioarchaeology of children in the province of Scythia. He was also awarded a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA (2019–2020), investigating children's deaths and burials in the Lower Danube region during Antiquity. Additionally, he completed an Erasmus mobility program at Université Lumière Lyon 2, where he studied French approaches to funerary archaeology, particularly archaeothanatology.

His work explores the funerary treatment of children, challenging assumptions about their marginalization in death. Studies on the mortuary archaeology of children from Histria and Ibida (in Scythia province) revealed that children’s burials often mirrored those of adults, contradicting traditional narratives of exclusion. The region’s burial customs, particularly in relation to children, have received limited attention, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of funerary traditions in this frontier zone.

His most recent works include Death at the Edge of Empire: Burial Practices in the Province of Scythia (Brill, 2024) and Meaningful Vaults: Creating and Experiencing Deathscapes in Late Roman and Early Byzantine Scythia (BAR International Series, 2024). He also presented his research on child burials at the 15th Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP) hosted by the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2023.





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