Children, Death and Burial

Eileen Murphy, Mélie Le Roy

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781785707155
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Social Sciences

Children, Death and Burials assembles a panorama of studies with a focus on juvenile burials; the 16 papers have a wide geographic and temporal breadth and represent a range of methodological approaches. All have a similar objective in mind, however, namely to understand how children were treated in death by different cultures in the past; to gain insights concerning the roles of children of different ages in their respective societies and to find evidence of the nature of past adult–child relationships and interactions across the life course. The contextualisation and integration of the data collected, both in the field and in the laboratory, enables more nuanced understandings to be gained in relation to the experiences of the young in the past. A broad range of issues are addressed within the volume, including the inclusion/exclusion of children in particular burial environments and the impact of age in relation to the place of children in society. Child burials clearly embody identity and 'the domestic child', 'the vulnerable child', 'the high status child', 'the cherished child', 'the potential child', 'the ritual child' and the 'political child', and combinations thereof, are evident throughout the narratives. Investigation of the burial practices afforded to children is pivotal to enlightenment in relation to key facets of past life, including the emotional responses shown towards children during life and in death, as well as an understanding of their place within the social strata and ritual activities of their societies.An important new collection of papers by leading researchers in funerary archaeology, examining the particular treatment of juvenile burials in the past. In particular focuses on the expression of varying status and identity of children in the funerary archaeological record as a key to understanding the place of children in different societies.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Archaeological Children, Death and Burial
• 2. How Were Infants Considered at Death during the Neolithic Period in France?
• 3. Perinatal Death and Cultural Buffering in a Neolithic Community at Çatalhöyük
• 4. Burying Children and Infants at Kadruka 23: New Insights into Juvenile Identity and Disposal of the Dead in the Nubian Neolithic
• 5. Children’s Burials in the Eneolithic Cemetery of Sultana-Malu Roşu, Romania
• 6. Late Chalcolithic Skeletal Remains and Associated Mortuary Practices from Çamlıbel Tarlası in Central Anatolia
• 7. Processed Babies: Early Bronze Age Infant Burials from Bulgarian Thrace
• 8. ‘Missing infants’: Giving Life to Aspects of Childhood in Mycenaean Greece via Intramural Burials
• 9. Bronze Age Child Burials in the Southern Trans-Urals (21st–15th Centuries cal. BC)
• 10. Juvenile Burial and Age as a Social Category in Funerary Contexts of Pre- and Protopalatial Crete
• 11. Geto-Dacian Child Burials in the Second Iron Age
• 12. Out of the Cradle and into the Grave: The Children of Anglo-Saxon Great Chesterford, Essex, England
• 13. Emotional Act, Superstition or Ritual? – Evidence from Child Burials in the Medieval period. A Case Study from St Clemens Churchyard, Copenhagen, Denmark
• 14. Interpreting Cultural and Biological Markers of Stress and Status in Medieval Subadults from England
• 15. Atypical Burial Practice and Juvenile Age-at-death in Later Medieval Gaelic Ireland: The Evidence from Ballyhanna, Co. Donegal
• 16. Interring the ‘Deserving’ Child: The Archaeology of the Deaths and Burials of Children at the Kilkenny Workhouse during the Great Famine in Ireland, 1845–52
• Index