Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 61

First steps towards an archaeology of children in Iceland
We might also consider the per-
centage of children’s burials in a purely
Icelandic context. Keldudalur’s figures are
certainly in broad agreement with later
medieval Christian cemeteries’ percent-
age of children’s graves (if not always the
percentage of neonates) where the excava-
tion and preservation has been best. Hof-
staðir has produced 23 infants under six
months of age among its 78 individuals;
Hafíjarðarey contained 60% juveniles; the
small sample of burials from Neðranes
produced three juveniles and five adults
(Gestsdóttir 2004; Gestdóttir 2006). In
contrast, two other medieval Christian
cemeteries produced very few children and
a third produced none at all (Steffensen
1943; Gestsdóttir 1998b: 4; Gestdóttir
2003:32). In these cases poor preservation
or limited excavation were the cause of the
limited evidence of children’s burials.
The issues in Iceland are not so
different from mainland Scandinavia in
the viking age. In Sweden, to take one
major region, there are similar questions
about the presence or absence of children
in viking age cemeteries. Some, more
recently-excavated, tenth-century Swed-
ish furnished cemeteries consist of fewer
than ten percent child burials, a percentage
more like the Icelandic one (e.g. Anders-
son 2005). However, children are not
universally ‘missing’. There are excep-
tions to the general rule. The very rich
cemeteries at the proto-urban settlement
at Birka included about 20% children’s
graves as signalled by grave goods and
grave size (Gráslund 1973). At Fjálkinge
in southem Sweden, about two-thirds of
the burials were of children (Svanberg
2003: 102). At the slightly later, Christian
cemetery at Lund, again in southern Swe-
den, there was also a very high percent-
age of burials of neonates (Arcini 1999:
53-5, 63-5); recent analysis of Sigtuna’s
medieval Christian cemeteries suggests
an overall figure of just under 25% sub-
adults among all excavated burials (under
fifteen in this case; Kjellström, Tesch &
Wikström 2005: 97, 103 Table 7). Some-
times the Christian burials demonstrate
that children can be buried inside a
church, presumably as they were part of a
high status family (e.g. Nilsen 1998). The
general pattern in mainland Scandinavia,
then, would appear to be one where child
burials are rare in cemeteries where grave
goods are most common (Welinder 1998:
196, Table 1). The general pattern in both
Iceland and mainland Scandinavia would
appear to be that child burials are rare in
cemeteries where grave goods are most
common (Welinder 1998: 196, Table 1).
Demography and infanticide
in the middle ages
Some scholars have already sought to
explain the general lack of child burials
in viking age cemeteries as the prod-
uct of infanticide (Clover 1988; Wicker
1998). Historically, infanticide is widely
recognised as having taken place in pre-
industrial societies the world over and
therefore, perhaps not surprisingly, it has
frequently been used by archaeologists to
explain low frequencies of child burials
(Mays 2000). Medievalists and viking
specialists are therefore not unusual in
this respect. Taking their lead from writ-
ten evidence, some have suggested that
selective female infanticide took place.
An equal ratio of males and females
among the adult population was suppos-
edly thought undesirable so that female
babies were unwanted and either exposed
or abandoned, left to die away from settle-
ments, with the result that they are practi-
cally archaeologically invisible.
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