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In terms of skeletal remains or in terms of toys, paraphernalia associated with childhood?
Lucy
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I have asked this question myself before, it was explained to me that children have softer bones than adults and as such they degrade alot more and a lot quicker than the bones of adults. don't know if this is true or not. open to suggestions though. good post troll!
deep
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To answer Deep first-that`s a bit of a myth. Infant/juvenile and sub-adult (depending on your terminology) will survive equally as well as adult remains dependent largely upon the burial environment and of course, taphonomic processes. The skeletal remains of ickle people are not always recognised as such by practitioners in the field or, are completely overlooked by report-writers as irrelevant. For Lucy, all of the above really but- as archaeologists we assume that children have no real role to play in the greater scheme of things.It would appear that the players in prehistory and history were simply born adult. In this sense, how do we identify children as even existing in the archaeological record? Of course, there are toys, historical and art-based images of games and the like but-thats just not enough! Where are all the children in our discourse? I think that the conference will be published in a BAR soon...Children used as sacrifices in South American temples-what is the "special"significance of children? The shaft graves of Mycenae and the gold-covered children-what was the perceived status of children? Five infants wrapped and deposited in a bog in Norway-what does this mean? p.s no wacko jacko puns please.....
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Well ok but, having worked in graveyards i do find that the skelatel remains of (especially) young children have often degraded more that adults from a similair aged burial.
deep
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well, I've worked on a hell of a lot of bodies both in the ground and out of it, and I've always found that, generally, sub-adult bones are as well preserved as the adults. You get the same degree of variation in preservation as adults, but they are not usually in a poor state of preservation if the adults are good. The bones just get missed/misidentified a hell of a lot more.
++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++
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Well to put my two pennyworth in.
I've had the same experiences as sniper, in that most bones tend to have the same degree of preservation, regardless of soil conditions. In fact in some areas, where the soil is known to be very acidic (or "agressive" as one specialist put it)the bone preservation has been surprisingly good.
Another explanation might be that some infant burials were not buried very deeply and tend to get shovelled/machined away easily.
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I'm not saying that it happens in every instance but, its often the small bones that are missing from childrens burials. the fingers, toes etc. the longer bones are generally in place, at first i thought that this was because of their small size and that they were being missed but all too often they are simply not there.
deep
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One suspects tha neonates were not regarded as full members of society in some periods/places and were therefore not buried with the same degree of care and respect, or the same rites.
You boney people, do you get differnetial preservation with cremation?
See Lillehammer G., 1989. A child is born: the child's world in an archaeological perspective. Norwegian Archeaological Review 22(2) 89-105.
I haven't seen it but got the ref from McLaren D, 2004. An important child's burial from Doune, Perth and Kinross, Scotland. In Gibson and Sheridan (Eds) From Sickles to circles 289-303.(Tempus) which includes a brief discussion of the issue.
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I remember that there was a book on the subject I saw at a conference once, I can't remember what it was called, but I did a quick search on Amazon and got these results "Hide and Seek: The Archaeology of Childhood" ~Julie Wileman; "Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology" ~Jenny Moore (Editor), Eleanor Scott (Editor). I don't think those are the one I was thinking of though, I think it was about the medieval period...
I was told that children and babies were probably buried quite shallowly and that ploughing etc would have badly damaged the remains. I don't know if that would apply in the post-med, but up until the 1950's in Ireland unbaptised children and strangers were buried elsewhere as they weren't allowed to be buried on consecrated gound and I think there was the same practice in England but it didn't go on as long. However baptised children should still have been interred in the main graveyard.
Lucy
The visibility of sub adults in the record
