Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Síða 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).
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