Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Side 67

Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Side 67
First steps towards an archaeology of children in Iceland weights (Eldjárn 2000: 115-9). Whether these individuals were all buried at the same time, or even in what relative order, cannot be deciphered and so the associa- tions of the grave goods are equally dif- ficult to work out. The other individuals buried at Vatnsdalur were a mixture of males and females estimated at between eighteen and forty-five. While we cannot be certain, it is possible that the teenagers buried at Vatnsdalur had been viewed as having the same high status as the other occupants of the grave. Taken together, the Hemla and Vatnsdalur burials suggest that people in their early to mid teens were buried in much the same way as many adults. On the one hand the rather mixed picture we have of appropriate customs for particular ages can be explained by the paucity of burials, on the other, it is striking that early Icelandic burial rites for children exhibit almost as much vari- ation as has been observed in the same period in Scandinavia. This suggests that there could have been a complex rela- tionship between age and the perceived status of the individual buried and their buriers; biological age was only part of the equation. One source for comparison, the corpus of Sagas of Icelanders, seems to suggest an equally varied view of the role and status of children (especially boys; they virtually ignore girls). The sagas make reference to children doing a variety of both mundane and remark- able things at different ages. The most frequent ages mentioned, however, are to the ages three, twelve and fifteen, ages which most often relate to elite males. The legal texts suggest that twelve and sixteen were significant ages for both genders but that legal rights for young women were more dependent on their marital status than their age (Callow forthcoming). It is too early to say how these various sources might relate to each other, if at all, but each form of evi- dence serves to remind us not to assume that biological age was the only deter- minant of social roles as people grew up. Returning to the burial archaeol- ogy, other elements in some child buri- als mark them out as somehow different from adult graves but do not stand out as a feature associated with the precise age of the deceased. This difference is expressed in varying ways but it is still significant that children are not treated the same way as adults. Sometimes the child’s burial follows a different alignment to nearby adult burials. At Ytra-Garðshorn, the largest cemetery of this period (albeit of only ten graves), all the burials followed a south-west to north-east alignment except for that of a girl aged between seven and twelve (grave no. 5), which was in a fair- ly central position in the cemetery and aligned south-north (Fig.2). At Hafurb- jarnarstaðir, where an infant was buried in a coffin and was one of at least six burials, all the others being of adults, it was aligned in almost exactly the oppo- site direction to all the adult burials, west- north-west to east-south-east with its head at the WNW end of the grave. The adult female buried closest to the infant, just a metre away, may have been its mother but the alignment of the woman follows that of the other adults rather than that of the child. It should be pointed out that occa- sionally adult graves in some of Iceland’s small cemeteries vary in alignment but in these cases there seems to be no discern- ible age-related pattern (e.g. at Gerða- kot and at Tyrðilmýri, Eldjárn 2000: 93, 120). 65

x

Archaeologia Islandica

Direkte link

Hvis du vil linke til denne avis/magasin, skal du bruge disse links:

Link til denne avis/magasin: Archaeologia Islandica
https://timarit.is/publication/1160

Link til dette eksemplar:

Link til denne side:

Link til denne artikel:

Venligst ikke link direkte til billeder eller PDfs på Timarit.is, da sådanne webadresser kan ændres uden advarsel. Brug venligst de angivne webadresser for at linke til sitet.