Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices: (10 Childhood in the Past Monograph Series)

Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices, the tenth volume in the SSCIP monograph series, explores the response of the living when dealing with the death of a child. This response is strongly connected to belief systems and concern for the fate of the deceased in the afterlife. The funerary rituals for each culture generally follow a prescribed format that will both satisfy the needs of the dead and ensure there are no negative consequences for the living. But how do we interpret burials that do not adhere to the recognised formula for their society? Can we find evidence that such differences involved positive or, indeed, negative emotions? Should atypical rites for children actually be considered normal since they are typical for their age cohort, differing only from those of adults, and perhaps simply reflect adult-centric interpretations of the past? The papers within the volume discuss these issues by focusing on juvenile burial practices in Europe and the Near East during recent prehistory and protohistory. The interpretation of normative, atypical or deviant is interrogated based on the context of the burials and the intentionality of the practice.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices – Eileen Murphy and Mélie Le Roy   Moments of Memory and Belonging. A Special Child Burial from Neolithic Ba`ja, Southern Jordan – Marion Benz, Hala Alarashi, Julia Gresky, Christoph Purschwitz and Hans Georg K. Gebel   The First Youngsters of a New Age: Juveniles in the Neolithic of Hungary – Alexandra Anders   Where Do the Children Go? Funerary Treatments of Juveniles Within Collective Burial Sites in Neolithic Southern France – Mélie Le Roy   Are They Really Missing? Non-Adult Graves of the Late Prehistory of Central Spain: An Archaeological and Bioanthropological Approach – Ana Mercedes Herrerro-Corral   Juvenile Burial Practices in Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Ireland: Interpretations of the Atypical – Cormac McSparron and Eileen Murphy   Sweet Child O’ Mine. Family Ties, Inheritance System and Representation of Infants in Iron Age Veneto: The Case of Mound L from Este, Padua – Fiorenza Bortolami   An Integrated Approach Towards the Analysis of Child Burials in the Etruscan Po Valley, Italy (6th-3rd century BC): Representation and Spatial Choices – Anna Serra   Burying Children in Iron Age Normandy: The Unusual Case of the Necropolis of Urville-Nacqueville, Second Century BC – Ana Arzelier, Caroline Partiot, Claire-Elise Fischer, Anthony Lefort, Melie Le Roy, Stéphane Rottier   Funerary Rituals for Juveniles in Gaul. Specificities and Standards of Infant Burials in Avaricum from the 1st to 5th Centuries AD – Raphaël Durand   A Childhood Cut Short? The Mortuary Analysis of Subadult Decapitation Burials in Western Roman Britain – Shaheen M. Christie   Mors Immatura in the Civitas of Forum Iulii, Narbonnensis Gaul: An Archaeothanatological Approach – Alexia Lattard and Aurore Schmitt   The Late Antiquity Burials of Verdier Nord, Lunel-Viel, Hérault, France: Graves on the Outskirts of the Necropolis – Sélim Djouad and Agathe Chen

About the Author :
Eileen Murphy is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her research focuses on human skeletal populations from prehistoric Russia and all periods in Ireland. She is particularly interested in the use of approaches from bioarchaeology and funerary archaeology to help further understanding of the lives and experiences of people in the past. She has published widely and is the co-editor of Children, Death and Burial: Archaeological Discourses (2017; with Mélie Le Roy) and Across the Generations: The Old and the Young in Past Societies (2018; with Grete Lillehammer). She is the founding and longstanding editor of the international journal, Childhood in the Past.   Mélie Le Roy is a Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at Bournemouth University, UK. Her research centres on the social consideration of children in an archaeological context to provide insights into past social organisation. She co-edited the book Children, Death and Burial: Archaeological Discourses (2017; with Eileen Murphy) and was guest co-editor of a volume of the journal Childhood in the Past entitled Children at Work (2019; with Caroline Polet).