Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 57

Chris Callow
FIRST STEPS TOWARDS AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF
CHILDREN IN ICELAND
In recent decades the archaeology and history of children and childhood have been
an extensive focus of research in North American and westem European schol-
arship. This article discusses issues appropriate for an Icelandic archaeology of
children based on the evidence we have so far which is mostly for the medieval
period. Reasons for the lack of early child burials are explored: selective female
infanticide is ruled out as a likely cause. Further investigation of the nature of our
existing evidence for early burial practices is needed, not least to try to find the
‘missing’ children. Excavated Icelandic children’s graves so far suggest a variety of
attitudes towards their deaths yet later material evidence for play or toys are scarce.
For all periods of Iceland’s history we will need to view the evidence of children’s
Iives in its wider European and sub-Arctic contexts.
Chrís Callow, Department of Medieval History, University of Birmingham,
England
Keywords: VikingAge, children, infanticide, Iceland, archaeology
Introduction
The last time I visited the Akureyri Muse-
um in northern Iceland (Minjasafnið á
Akureyri) I was struck by the display of
twentieth-century toys which were piled
up in one display case. One display case
mostly contained a vast array of different
kinds of dolls. The dolls were probably
manufactured somewhere outside Iceland
and were aimed at girls of about five to
twelve years old in western Europe or
Northern America. Besides the obvious
museum interpretation issues about what
kind of reaction (foreign) visitors were
supposed to have to these toys, there are
a number of other issues which we ought
to consider as archaeologists of childhood
or archaeologists of Iceland.
My assumption, of course, was
that these objects were important toys but
they need not have been. Children often
make use of all kinds of objects as toys.
Yet who bought these mass produced
objects, or gave them as gifts? Who really
played with them? How widely available
or affordable were they? How gendered
was their use? How often were they played
with and how often were simpler, home-
made toys used? For the relatively recent
Icelandic past many of these questions
can be addressed by documentary and
oral historians of the twentieth century.
Yet in Icelandic archaeology, however, the
bulk of our evidence is from the medieval
period. The medieval archaeology can be
compared with medieval written evidence
but the latter is arguably more difficult to
interpret than more modern documents
and testimony. It is a fortunate coinci-
dence that there has been significant inter-
Archaeologia Islandica 5 (2006) 55-96