Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 59

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- 57

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Archaeologia Islandica

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