Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Side 63

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Side 63
First steps towards an archaeology of children in Iceland cases recording large numbers of parents exposing their children. Another line of argument which Clover follows concerns polygny. She proposes that early medieval Scandi- navian society practised polygyny and points out the correlation between socie- ties that practise polygyny and those that practise female infanticide (Clover 1988: 170-2). The existence of polygny in early medieval Scandinavia is also is open to question because, again, it is supported by later literary evidence. Certainly for early Icelandic society it is hard to imag- ine that there was a desire to reduce the number of women who might survive to reach child-bearing age and then actually bear children and help sustain the new colony. In this context Clover cites many examples from other cultures where boys are seen as more valuable than girls but this runs counter to the needs of a society only recently having migrated to a new and relatively hostile environment such as Iceland. All healthy workers were surely valuable; and women’s deaths in child- birth should have made them more valu- able not less. It seems possible that in the very earliest decades of Iceland’s coloni- sation there were more men than women but it seems unnecessary to suppose that this imbalance was not rectified by, say, AD 1000. If we turn to the archaeology, adult burial populations have also been used to support the view that selective female infanticide took place in early medieval Scandinavia. In many cemeteries fewer adult females than males have been found. Yet the data ought simply not to be used in this way. There are well-known and continuing difficulties in determin- ing the biological sex of adult skeletons with the problem that the sex of many skeletons cannot be determined. Probably more important is the tendency to overes- timate the number of males where a sex determination is made. Osteologists know and accept that this is the case; techniques are not yet sophisticated enough for us to make better assessments of biological sex for archaeological skeletal material (e.g. Walker 2005). Even the stronger propo- nents of selective female infanticide rec- ognise the limitations for their case based on the archaeological evidence (Wicker 1998: 210-16). The strongest noted imbalance between genders was solely based on an analysis of Norwegian burials accompa- nied by grave goods (rather than of all burials). It assumed that the grave goods associated with the buried individual can be easily and directly related to the bio- logical sex of the person buried (Dom- masnes 1979: 98-103; Clover 1988: 165). Ratios of three male style burials to one female style burial (and indeed much higher) have been detected on this basis. The usefulness of this information for demographic patterns is limited for the reasons already mentioned: it is only a measure of the apparent gender of part of the population and not their biological sex; in reality, gender may have been far more complex than a simple binary divi- sion between all males and all females (Welinder 1998). And, in fact, where oste- ological analysis has taken place, the ratio of males to females can be much closer to 1:1. The classic study of Danish graves gave a male:female figure 1.16:1 and a more recent Swedish one gave exactly 1:1 (Sellevold et al 1984:178; Bolin 2004:176). It might also be argued that cremation burial, a rite which occurs in variable frequencies all over Scandinavia in the early middle ages and in which gen- 61

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Archaeologia Islandica

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