Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 71

First steps towards an archaeology of children in Iceland
Two of the youngest infants appeared to
be ‘associated with’ adults of indetermi-
nate sex aged 25 to 35, one of them in fact
with two adults. At this cemetery, how-
ever, some infants were buried in their
own individual coffins which, although
smaller than adult ones, were in other
respects of standard style and construc-
tion (ibid.: 84, 95).
Some tentative conclusions
might be drawn from the Hólskirkja exca-
vations. Children seem to have been bur-
ied in the same part of the cemetery as
adults which implies that they are regard-
ed in some way to form part of the adult
community, at least in death. Similarly the
‘rules’ about the choice of coffin seem to
apply equally to adults and children in
this cemetery: both could be (or had to
be?) buried in one of a range of propri-
etary coffin types. The burials of infants
within the same coffins as an adult, how-
ever, raise questions about the practi-
calities and emotional aspects of burying
the dead and the timing of the deaths of
individuals buried together which are not
easy to resolve: other evidence suggests
that post-medieval Icelanders sometimes
buried their children with adults who were
not relatives (ibid.: 94). Where children
have their own coffins it would appear
that their families were either sufficiently
wealthy or emotionally affected, or keen
to display one or the other, to provide a
coffin like that of an adult.
Further excavations will, of
course, allow us to see whether the way
children were buried in later centuries in
Iceland follow more or less peculiarly Ice-
landic patterns and to allow us to refine
our ideas about issues such as how status
was shown in the seemingly more uni-
form Christian cemeteries of later centu-
ries. Paleopathological analysis may also
through light on wider issues of health
and economic conditions in post-medie-
val Iceland. The traditional view has been
that life was simply worse under Dan-
ish control in later centuries than before.
More, detailed analysis of skeletal col-
lections such as that from Viðey (where
a partial excavation of an unusual site
revealed very few children, Gestsdóttir
2004: 32-47) will provide a fresh angle
from which to address the issue of social
and/or climate/environmental change in
the post-medieval period.
Conclusions and the future
Some general points can be made based
on the evidence and discussion above.
Medieval and modern adult Icelanders
have treated children as a separate catego-
ry to themselves. Children do emerge as
being treated differently to adults in death
and Iceland is like many other societies in
this respect. The age-related patterns also
show generally similar tendencies to early
medieval furnished cemeteries elsewhere:
teenagers of both sexes could be invested
with as much importance as people much
older and childhood could be much short-
er than we are sometimes used to thinking
of it. There is not the Icelandic data avail-
able yet, however, to make a more signifi-
cant study such as that of Halsall (1996)
for Frankish burial archaeology or Craw-
ford (1999) for Anglo-Saxon England.
There is room for much further
discussion of children in Icelandic socie-
ty. As for other times and places, the sim-
ple absence of evidence for children has
been the main limitation on the interest
in the subject. Yet we do have some evi-
dence and there are useful comparative
data sets and debates with which Icelan-
dic archaeology will be able to engage.
We will have to be careful, as with other
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