The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology available in Hardcover, Paperback
The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology
- ISBN-10:
- 0521836026
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521836029
- Pub. Date:
- 11/30/2006
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521836026
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521836029
- Pub. Date:
- 11/30/2006
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology
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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780521836029 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Publication date: | 11/30/2006 |
Series: | Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology , #50 |
Edition description: | First Edition |
Pages: | 266 |
Product dimensions: | 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d) |
About the Author
Mary E. Lewis is a lecturer at the University of Reading and has taught palaeopathology and forensic anthropology to undergraduate and postgraduate students for over ten years. Mary is also an advisor to the police and is currently a registered Forensic Anthropologist for Ministry of Defence.
Read an Excerpt
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-83602-9 - The Bioarchaeology of Children - Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology - by Mary E. Lewis
excerpt
1 The bioarchaeology of children
1.1 hildren in archaeology
This book reviews the current status of children’s skeletal remains in biological and forensic anthropology. Child skeletons provide a wealth of information on their physical and social life from their growth and development, diet and age at death, to the social and economic factors that expose them to trauma and disease at different stages of their brief lives. Cultural attitudes dictate where and how infants and children are buried, when they assume their gender identity, whether they are exposed to physical abuse, and at what age they are considered adults. Similarly, children may enter the forensic record as the result of warfare, neglect, abuse, murder, accident or suicide and the presence of young children within a mass grave has powerful legal connotations. The death of a child under suspicious circumstances is highly emotive and often creates intense media coverage and public concern, making the recovery and identification of their remains more pressing. In forensic anthropology, techniques used to provide a biological and personal identification as well as the cause and manner of death provide particular challenges.
The study of children andchildhood in social archaeology emerged out of gender theory in the 1990s, and has gradually increased in its sophistication, moving children out of the realm of women’s work, to participating and active agents in the past, with their own social identity, material culture and influence on the physical environment around them. Children who were once invisible in the archaeological record are slowly coming into view. The primary data for the archaeology of childhood are the children themselves, and in order to progress this new discipline, it is important to examine how bioarchaeologists derive the data from which social interpretations are made, and the limitations that are inherent in the methods and nature of immature skeletal material, including the impact of the burial environment on their recovery.
Comparative studies of children from archaeological contexts have been complicated by the eclectic use of terminology that both describes the skeleton as a child and prescribes an age for the individual. For example, the use of the term ‘infant’ properly assigned to those under 1 year of age, has been used to describe children aged up to 5 years, whereas ‘juvenile’ can be divided into ‘juvenile I’ or ‘juvenile Ⅱ’ with a variety of ages assigned. One of the most popular terms used by osteologists to describe children is ‘sub-adult’. This term is problematic as it has been used to define a specific age category within the childhood period. More fundamentally, sub-adult implies that the study of these remains is somehow less important than that of the adults (i.e. sub = below). Throughout this book children are described as ‘non-adults’ encompassing all children recovered from the archaeological record up to the age of 17 years. Additional terms divide this overarching category into critical physiological periods of the child’s life (Table ).Tab 1.1 These terms are used for ease of reference and provide a biological basis for discussion; they are not intended to describe the complex social experience of the youngest members of every society, past or present.
Table 1.1 Age terminology used in this volume
Term | Period | ||
Embryo | First 8 weeks of intra-uterine life | ||
Fetus | From 8 weeks of intra-uterine life to birth | ||
Stillbirth | Infant born dead after 28 weeks gestation | ||
Perinatal, perinate | Around birth, from 24 weeks gestation to 7 postnatal days | ||
Neonatal, neonate | Birth to 27 postnatal days | ||
Post-neonatal | 28–346 postnatal days (1 year) | ||
Infant | Birth to 1 year | ||
Non-adult | ≤17 years | ||
Child | 1–14.6 years | ||
Adolescent | 14.6–17.0 years | ||
Adult | >17 years | ||
Birth to 8 months | 8 months to 1.5 years | 1.5 to 3 years | 5 years |
Lifts and holds up head | Begins to crawl and may stand aided by furniture | Stands on one foot or on tiptoe | |
Turns over unaided (7 months) | Can throw without losing balance | Can run, skip, climb and has a developed sense of balance | Dresses and undresses |
Reaches towards objects | Handles finger-foods Uses spoons and cups | Imitates others | |
Becomes anxious when separated from loved ones | Understands people and objects still exist when they cannot be seen | ||
Smiling and gazing | Shows affection by kissing and hugging | Expresses pride, pleasure, embarrassment and shame | |
Responds to name | Listens to stories | Tells stories | |
Explores environment | Understands the future and the past | ||
Interacts with other children | Social interaction and role-playing | ||
Gurgles and babbles to communicate | Forms simple sentences | Uses sentences to communicate feelings and needs | Asks questions about the meaning of words |
Has no understanding of ‘male’ and ‘female’ | Understands ‘male’ and ‘female’ through dress and over time, but not changing situations | Understands ‘male’ and ‘female’ through time and situations: ‘gender consistency’ | |
Source: Collated from Berhrman et al. (1996) and Kohlberg (1966). |
1.2.2 Defining the child: biological versus cultural age
One of the resounding issues with the definition of a ‘child’ in archaeological contexts is the use of physiological age to determine a social category ( Gowland, 2001; Baxter, 2005). Physiological age is a biological reality, whereas ‘child’ is a culturally loaded term. The age at which an individual leaves the world of dependency, learning and play, and takes on roles of work and social responsibility is neither distinct nor universal. That there are three types of age category, ‘biological’, ‘chronological’ and ‘social’, is not denied, but in order to examine the past life-course we need to have consistency in the raw data (the skeletal remains), and use accurate osteological assessments of age and physiological development as a marker from which to base our interpretations of the social understanding of age in the past. Biological age is not irrelevant in the way in which society treats a child. It affects children’s connection to their physical and social environment, from total dependency during infancy, to when they begin to crawl, walk, talk and communicate with the adults and children around them (Table ).Tab 1.2 These abilities are physiologically determined and they dictate how the child interacts. In particular, the misuse of the term ‘infant’ to refer to children between the ages of 1 and 3 years or 1 and 5 years in studies that use skeletal evidence as their data misses this point. As an infant (under 1 year), the child is particularly vulnerable to disease and death, and its chances of survival significantly increase after the first year. Children who die at around 2 years of age may be reflecting inadequate weaning methods or unsanitary conditions, and those that make it to 3 years are talking, playing and actively mobile. By 5 years they are capable of contributing to the household with minor chores. To categorise this most vital developmental period into one age category, ‘infant’, will mask important physiological and, hence, social advancements.
Derevenski (1997) refers to Kohlberg’s (1966) work on a child’s understanding of gender roles. Before the age of 2, a child has no concept of male or female but after 2 years of age, they begin to recognise males and females by visual prompts such as clothing. Between the ages of 3 and 4 years, a child’s concept of gender becomes stable, and is understood through time. Hence, if you are male when you are young, the child understands that you will be male as an adult, but if a male begins to perform what the child perceives as female roles, the male would become female. A stage of ‘gender consistency’ through time and situation is not reached until the child is 5 (Table ). Wiley and Pike (1998) suggested the use of developmental stages rather than chronological age to devise child mortality rates to take into account the activity of the child (crawling, weaning, walking), which is often related to their cause of death through exposure to disease and accidental injury. Although they propose this method for use in modern communities where calendar age is rarely recorded, the application of such developmental age categories into archaeological studies has the advantage of placing the child at the centre of the study by examining the environment from their vantage point.
Although biological age categories provide data from which interpretations are made, adult perceptions of the ability, maturity and responsibilities of children at each age are culturally determined, and must be considered when trying to ask questions about past child activity and health. In the later medieval period, the ages of 8–12 years represented a time when children would begin their apprenticeships (Cunningham, 1995), and children as young as 12 and 14 years could be married in ancient Egypt and Rome respectively, leaving the realm of child for that of wife and mother. Childbirth is not a common interpretation for the cause of death for older children within the burial record. Today in the UK, children reach adulthood by degrees. At 16 they can legally have sex, at 17 they can learn to drive, at 18 they can drink, get married and vote, reflecting their status as full members of society. Crawford (1991) rightly criticises archaeologists for their inconsistency in choosing the cut-off point for children in archaeological reports, which vary from 15 years to 25 years in some cases. These inconsistencies have a great impact on the way in which a cemetery is interpreted. Moving an individual from one age category to another can fundamentally change the profile of a cemetery when attempting to evaluate the pattern of adult and non-adult burials, and to understand the significance of their grave inclusions.
Attempts to define periods of transition in childhood have been carried out by examining the burial of children and the engendered nature of their gravegoods at certain ages. Gowland (2001, 2002) noted that at Romano-British Lankhills in Hampshire, children were buried with gravegoods from the age of 4 and the quantity of artefacts peaked between 8 and 12 years. Gowland (2001) suggests that in these communities at least, age thresholds appear at infancy (where perinates are interred outside of the cemetery area), at 4 years and between 8 and 12 years where the quantity and wealth of gravegoods increases. Stoodley (2000) examined the presence of certain gravegoods within burials from a large number of Anglo-Saxon graves in England. He noted that ‘masculine’ spears began to appear more frequently in male graves after the age of 10–14 years, whereas ‘female’ beads and dress adornments appeared in ‘girl’s’ graves at between 10 and 12 years. This study suffers from a common circular argument which stems from our inability to provide a biological sex for non-adults, and a Westernised view of what is ‘masculine’ and what is ‘feminine’. This circle was partially broken in Rega’s (1997) study of burials from Bronze Age Mokrin in Yugoslavia, where children were sexed using canine tooth-crown dimensions. Using these data, Rega revealed that all children were provided with the same feminine engendered artefacts found in adult female graves until around 17 years of age, when individuals sexed as male began to be buried with artefacts associated with the male adult graves. Stoodley’s (2000) age bracket in the Anglo-Saxon childhood life-course is supported by Crawford’s (1991) analysis of contemporary records revealing that children as young as 10 years could inherit property and be prosecuted under adult laws. Kamp (2001) provides an excellent review of the development of childhood studies and argues that the age categories employed by osteologists are often selected and compared without reference to the society in which the children lived. Biological or physical development and social markers of childhood are not always related. This was demonstrated in Van Gennep’s (1960) The Rites of Passage in which physical puberty did not always coincide with the rites of passage that marked the adolescents’ entry into the adult world. Archaeological evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period also attests to this, with male adult-type gravegoods only appearing once an individual has reached 20–25 years (Stoodley, 2000), some 6 years after they would have reached puberty. While the study of childhood has come some way in elucidating a particular section of the human life-course, Gilchrist (2004) calls attention to the fact that other age categories are still neglected, among them, what it was to be an adolescent in the past.
1.2.3 Children in the archaeological record
Some artefacts have provided tangible links to children in the past. Footprints (Roveland, 2000), death masks (Coulon, 1994), fingerprints on pots (Baart, 1990) and tooth marks in resin (Aveling, 1997) all prove that a child was there. Wilkie’s (2000) discussion of toys that were designed, manufactured and sold with children in mind forced historical archaeologists to acknowledge them as actors in past society, but this concept has been slow to catch on in time periods where the material evidence is not so rich. It may be that our association with children and toys is based on Western ideals of what childhood should be, and this has led some scholars to avoid toys as a route to the activities of children (Derevenski, 1994). Nevertheless, humans learn through play, trial and error and it is conceivable that small items or badly drawn or sculpted figures in the archaeological record were used and created by children. Just as female engendered space is now recognised in the past, it is time to start considering the potential of identifying childhood spaces, where ‘women and children’ are no longer seen as one entity and children are viewed as independent agents within their own social space (Wilkie, 2000). Children have the imagination to make toys out of sticks, stones and everyday household objects that will be invisible in the archaeological record. In this way, children may influence the formation processes of a site, perhaps by the movement of artefacts from their original site of deposition (e.g. a midden), and the physical alteration of household objects. A small pile of stones or an unusual collection of post-holes may indicate a child was at play, and this possibility should be taken into account when interpreting a site. Until recently, child activity in the archaeological record has been seen as detracting from the real issues of adult behaviour (Bonnichsen, 1973; Hammond and Hammond, 1981), rather than being viewed as informative of the child’s interaction with its physical environment.
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Possible toys from the Ovcarovo ‘cult scene’. From Whittle (1996:94), reproduced with kind permission from Cambridge University Press.
Possible toys have been recovered from various sites throughout Europe. Of particular note are the small decorated clay figures, miniature furniture and tiny bowls found at Ovcarovo, Bulgaria (Fig. ),Fig 1.1 and the clay house and figurines located in a house at Platia Magoula Zarkou, northern Greece, both finds dating to the Neolithic (Whittle, 1996). Rossi (1993) identified two ivory dolls in the grave of a Roman child from Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Such items were traditionally interpreted as ‘cult’ objects or foundation offerings, rather than as a child’s playthings. On the other hand, the idea that all miniaturised items represent toys is overly simplistic. Sillar (1994) noted that in the Andes, while children will play with miniature pots, mimicking adult household practices such as cooking and trade, such pots were also used by adults as donations at shrines. In lithics analysis, small cores have been interpreted as being made by children mimicking the adult knappers. Finlay (1997) suggests that inconsistently made lithic artefacts may be the work of young apprentices, learning the trade and that, as producers, children would make lithics in keeping with the adult norms, rather than on a miniature scale. Bird and Bird (2000:462) argue that differences between adult and child foraging patterns are not always about the learning process, and that ‘children are not always practicing to be good adults . . . but are predictably behaving in ways that efficiently solve immediate fitness trade-offs’. If this pattern is predictable then we should be able to identify it in the archaeological record. In particular, Bird and Bird (2000) examined the different adult and child patterns of shellfishing in the Eastern Torres Strait on the Great Barrier Reef. Due to their inexperience, children tended to collect a wider variety of less valuable shellfish, which they proceeded to eat, leaving them in small middens outside the settlement. Adults were able to exclusively collect the most profitable and difficult-to-gather shellfish, avoiding the types the children collected. In the archaeological record, two forms of shell midden in different locations should be evident, with the more diverse and marginal middens representing the foraging patterns of the children.
1.3 Children in biological anthropology
The study of children in biological anthropology has earlier beginnings than in social archaeology, but they were no less focussed. Most studies were stimulated by an interest in fertility levels, or the information that child survival could provide on adult adaptation to their changing surroundings. These endeavours were constantly being frustrated by the perceived notion that infant and child remains could not survive the burial environment. It was only in the 1990s that the study of non-adult skeletons began to concentrate on the information that could be provided on the growth and health of the children themselves, providing information on their activities and risk of infection or injury in contrasting environments. Examination of the physical remains of children provides us with the most direct and intimate evidence for them in the past. This section outlines the development of the study of child skeletal remains in biological anthropology and palaeopathology up until the present day.
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