Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Qupperneq 70

Christopher Callow
Figure 3. a) a miniature wooden horse discovered during excavations at Hólar, Skagafjörður. The
horse is about 3.5cm in length; b) an anthropomorphic carved wooden jigure excavated at Hólar,
Skagafjörður. Images courtesy and copyright of Ragnheiður Traustadóttir.
Post-medieval children
Although most of our archaeological evi-
dence for Iceland is from the medieval
period, a recent growth in the apprecia-
tion of post-medieval heritage has seen
an increase in later archaeology (e.g
Guðmundsson et al 2005; Lárusdóttir
et al 2005). One recent rescue excava-
tion reminds us of the potential for later
burial archaeology to raise similar issues
about attitudes towards children. Histori-
cal archaeology, at least in the English-
speaking world, is also taking a growing
interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century cemeteries and providing data
on child burials with which the Icelandic
material will be comparable (e.g. Brick-
ley & Buteux 2006; Cox 1996).
The excavation at the church at
Hólskirkja in Bolungarvík in ísafjörður
in the Westfjords revealed twenty-two
graves dating to the eighteenth- to early
twentieth-century in test pits which were
dug along the southern wall of the mod-
em church (itself built in 1908) (Guð-
mundsson et al. 2005). All the individuals
were apparently buried in wooden coffins
and of the twenty-two burials five were of
children. Of those five, two were proba-
bly still-born infants of over thirty weeks,
a third was estimated to be a perinatal
infant of 42 weeks, the fourth was aged
between six and twelve months and the
last, partial skeleton, was of an individual
who died at some stage before they were
fourteen years old (ibid.: 84, 88, 91, 92).
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