Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 59

First steps towards an archaeology of children in Iceland
we should not lose sight of the fact that
work was probably an important part of
many medieval childhoods and especially
where people lived in harsher landscapes
such as Iceland’s.
More recent research, both by
archaeologists and historians, has fleshed
out our picture of medieval children,
especially for England. Nicholas Orme’s
work (2001), focussing on written evi-
dence, covered the whole of the middle
ages but with an inevitable bias towards
the period 1100 to 1500 because of the
differential survival of the documentary
evidence. Nevertheless Orme demon-
strates the variety of children’s experi-
ences as some of his chapter headings
demonstrate: Family Life; Danger and
Death; Words, Rhymes and Songs; Play;
Church; Learning to Read; Reading for
Pleasure; Growing Up. For archaeologists
of westem Europe, however, greater mile-
age can be made from the period before
1000 because of the wider variety of
(furnished) burial practice as opposed to
the later, largely unfurnished, burial rite.
Sally Crawford, looking at Anglo-Saxon
furnished graves mostly of the period
c.500 to c.700 points out the general lack
of grave goods in children’s graves, both
in number and range. In death children
were treated as if they were low status
adults rather than as a distinct category
with their own ‘signature’ range of grave
good (Crawford 1999: 169). Crawford
reminds us of the difficulties of deter-
mining simple, ‘one size fits all’ ideas
about children’s development and roles
(ibid.: 170). At the same time we should
remember that lavish, accompanied buri-
al displaying symbolism associated with
gender and/or age was never the norm
in north-western Europe (Bolin 2004;
Arnold 1997: 178). Where it occurs we
are seeing an élite or aspirational group
expressing itself - this goes for the burial
of children as much as for adults (Dom-
masnes 1982). Finally, it is well to note
that Orme, Crawford and others are also
at pains to remind us that, while some
children had an unpleasant time or were
mistreated, that the balance of evidence
points towards most medieval people car-
ing for and nurturing their children well.
This may seem self-evident but part of
Ariés’ legacy was to make scholars doubt
that medieval parents could care for their
multitude of children (Crawford 1999;
Jakobsson 2005: 65-6). Paleopathologi-
cal studies have also allowed a perspec-
tive on children’s health but, given the
limited Icelandic data, this form of evi-
dence will not be discussed (although see,
for example, Gestsdóttir 2004).
Historians of medieval Iceland
have also taken a more sustained interest
in children in recent years. An Icelandic
volume demonstrates that the concems
of intemational research on childhood are
influencing Icelandic scholars and it is to
be hoped that the influence will eventu-
ally be in both directions (Jakobsson and
Tulinius 2005). The variety of images of
children in literature; the difficulties of
tracking the transition from child to adult;
the importance of fosterage and complex
pattems of affection at all levels of society;
the differences between the childhoods of
boys and girls; all emerge clearly from this
recent research.
Medieval Icelandic children and
archaeology
The burial archaeology of Iceland’s earli-
est centuries consists of inhumation buri-
als which are mostly furnished, are often
considered to be pagan and are gener-
ally dated to the ninth and tenth centu-
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