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Many thanks for the references peeps-keep it coming. One potential driver for the bias towards the deterioration of the ickle people in the buried environment is one of gut content at the point of deposition.We may assume that up until death, ickle people would have been fed regularly and in all probability, shortly before expiration. This would hold more so for children fed by the breast and may explain a generally unusual greater rate of decay for children against adult inhumations?
-Invisible-twas Grete Lillehammer who presented "Five Infants in a Bog" at said conference...
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I have been on sites, mostly Roman, where babies have been buried at the top of ditches, just along the side of the actual ditch cut. One or two of these were mistaken as chicken bones until the skull was uncovered.
I have also seen two or three baby burials within the foundations of a building, again on Roman sites. We also had a mother and, presumably,her child buried together. That one was interesting as the woman appeared to be cuddling the child. In all these the bones have been just as well preserved as the adults we had on these sites.
Anyone else come across babies buried in ditches and foundations?
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Neo-nates and infants were buried in and beneath floors of aceramic and later ceramic Neolithic houses in Khirokitia (Cyprus) from about the 10th Millennium BC and including 7000 BC calibrated. Not just once but, in some cases, layers of floors containing one, two or four babies. "foundation" burials within Roman domestic structures are not uncommon and a "law" was generally followed dictating that babies be buried "within the canopy of houses". A good example from the U.K would be the Dorchester Roman townhouse (Dorset). Dr Raimund Karl and Klaus Locker of the Universities of Bangor and Vienna have studied a central European Iron Age (450BC) community where infants were buried beneath internal walls of houses and in boundary ditches and also along pathways. Perhaps the act of burying children within the home could be seen as an act of "seeding" your home/nuclear family? Burial along/near boundaries may be representative of liminality or indeed, transition?
I worked on a site in north Nottinghamshire where infants were buried within a large, shallow pit. From memory, at least five were recovered. This is exactly what I am trying to get at-why? and what did all this mean? The treatment of infants and children in any period could be a good insight into the communities on the whole. My recent work in the near east recovered over 30 infants and children among adults in one rock-cut chambered tomb (2,500BC) from only one two metre square test trench! Analysis is under way-will keep you informed.
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OK, i admit i may have mattocked the odd one or two, but not all of them.
deep
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We had a neonate in a shallow rubbish pit on a Roman site in Essex - the soil conditions were variable, but the only other burials retrieved in good condition were crems. The neonate was nearer to the house than the other burials, and in very good condition, which we put down to the charcoal and oyster shell in the pit fill. Also in Essex, a site with a few Roman burials including an infant in the side of a ditch, with an oyster shell over the chest, again some distance from the other burials.
Body at work and mind on vacation
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I know this is an old thread but i must have missed it. My two bobs worth is- I have personally excavated close to 500 burials from all periods in three countries. In Oz on a colonial burial ground we could identify the remains of child burials from coffin wood stains in the soil. High background acidity, so you were lucky to find a childs tooth if anything. Adults were in poor condition but still there. A very high number of burials were of children (i estmated 1/4-1/3).
Eire- Realised many diggers were confused on the identification of neo-nate bones (confusing them with small animal or bird remains). Mattocks are also the great child destroyer. If you don't realise you've hit it with the first swing, you'll remove it completely with the second. I'm sure there are a lot of disarticulate bone bags containing tiny complete skelies.
I also worked on a Killeen (childs burial ground). A lot were fairly recent, but as the died without being baptised.... Most were very shallow.
England- baby burials and juves under the floor of a chapter house.
They are there if you look for them but I feel that quite a few archaeologist don't realise what they've got unless their actually shown what the remains look like. I agree that machining probably removes many from the record.
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So is Digger saying that child burials do survive as well as adults or not?
or is it a case of the background soil conditions having a greater impact on any burial?
deep
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There's been a couple of times I've been going through a bag of 'animal bone' to find the skelaton of baby in it. Anyone who has examined the skelaton of a baby or dug one up, will tell you how impossibly tiny and fragile it is. That they don't survive all that well, isn't that surprising.
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twenty years ago a friends sister fell down the stairs, she was about 3yrs old. she should have broken her leg, but the bone was'nt hard enough to break and it bent instead. she had to wear callipers until her mid teens and she's fine now. this does show the great difference between adult and child bone i think.
deep
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Generally speaking, the bones of the ickle people survive equally as well as those of the adult. When both adult and ickle person are recovered from the same burial environment, there will generally be little difference in the survival standard of the remains. For the most part, ickle people are missed at the point of trowel or, mis-identified during the post-ex phase. This is something that requires attention from Institutes and training establishments. Where an infant has decayed at a faster rate than for example, a contemporary adult in the same environment, this may be due to the gut content of the child at the point of burial.....they are there guys, sad thing is, they do get chucked out with the bathwater on occasion.....
