RAC/TRAC Session 21: The Material Culture of Childhood

Conference Sessions and Abstracts - Friday 12 April 2024

21. The Material Culture of Childhood

Juliet Samson-Conlon – Birkbeck

Objects of childhood are culturally significant (Aries, 1962). They are part of how cultural norms are created and reinforced and are a valuable source for illuminating the lived experiences and social identities of children. It is possible to trace the courses of Roman childhood through material culture: for example, there is evidence for terracotta bottles being used to feed infants; dolls and a variety of toys would have been used in play and socialisation; and the protective bulla or lunula would be worn throughout childhood and removed to mark adolescence, as a rite of passage into adulthood.

It is only in recent years that the lacunae in scholarship on children and childhood in the Roman world has been addressed with a view to understanding how childhood was both perceived socially and experienced individually. Age, per se, was not important; indeed, the Latin vocabulary did not contain words for ‘baby’, ‘infant’, or ‘toddler’ (Laes, 2011). Rather, childhood was viewed as a social category rather than a biological or developmental one, with the social roles that children could fulfil being defined by status and not by chronological age. Archaeology has enabled a fuller understanding of childhood in antiquity, demonstrating for example that jointed bone dolls are not simply passive artefacts that prepared their owner for the roles of being a wife and a mother but had a broader cultural significance, and are complex facets of identity formation and gender construction (Dolansky, 2012).
This session will bring together contributions from recent and on-going research into the material culture of childhood in the Roman world and will address how we can archaeologically understand childhood in the past. Papers are particularly welcome on specific object identifications, comparative analysis, or studies of individual sites which cover settlement and/or burial data in relation to childhood.

Session schedule 

Abstracts 

 Childhood in the Roman Near East:  the evidence from Dura-Europos
Juliet Samson-Conlon – Birkbeck 

Society is reproduced through children and their enculturation, yet childhood can be problematic to interpret archaeologically, often relying upon decontextualised finds.  This paper will provide an introduction to how we can archaeologically understand childhood in the past, in the context of the site of Dura-Europos in Syria. The site was extensively excavated in the 1920’s & 30’s, yielding a rich array of material, including contextualised finds relating to children. Using the opportunities provided for by the volume and variety of secure archaeological data from Dura (approximately 15,000 artefacts from ten seasons of published excavation) this paper will highlight some of the material available for examining childhood at the site, which includes both settlement and burial evidence. With its focussed contribution on this one specific site in the Roman Near East, this paper will provide an overview of some of the unique opportunities that are available, in relation to the archaeology of childhood widening the discourse on children and childhood in the wider Roman world, whilst also addressing broader questions of everyday life, cultural interaction and gendered practices.

 Adorning Childhood: Identifying Childhood through Adornment
Courtney A Ward

Studies on the material culture of childhood dress and adornment often focus on the bulla of the freeborn boy and the lunula that was associated with girls; however, were these really the clear-cut markers of childhood identity that the literature suggests? This paper looks at the assemblages of amulets and jewellery associated with children from sites preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 (e.g., Pompeii and Herculaneum). This material is particularly informative as it documents the lived experience (and adornment) of children rather than presenting identities that were created for them in death. This paper argues that as Roman children moved from infantia to adolescence, becoming more active and visible members of the household (and society), so too their adornment moved from more inward-focusing apotropaic charms and amulets to active objects that helped create and display identity. Further, it identifies a gender divide (between puer and puella) in this transitional period and the ways in which this was expressed through adornment. Overall, this paper uses the personal adornment found with children in Roman Campania to archaeologically identify stages of childhood that are not highlighted or only hinted at in the written record.

 Investigating Roman maidens’ skills: spinning tools, writing sets and gaming pieces in the funerary contexts of the Roman Empire
Ada Nifosi – University of Kent

The Roman tombs of young, and perhaps unmarried, women found in the Roman Empire, and dating between the 1st and the 4th c. AD, have received great attention from scholars in the past few decades. Previous studies have focused on the most striking aspects of young girls’ exceptional burials: the mummification of some of these girls in an oriental fashion; the unusual amount of jewellery; the presence in many of these tombs of ivory and bone dolls. Less attention has been paid to the funerary objects which showed the girls’ practical skills: in particular spinning tools, such as finger distaffs, writing sets, gaming pieces and even musical instruments. Why were these objects included in tombs of young girls? Were they included as material attestations of the girls’ agency, as part of their future dowry or as symbols of their ideal skills? This paper stems from my ongoing book project on maidenhood in funerary contexts and will offer evidence coming from several tombs of young women in the Roman Empire (in particular Italy and Egypt) and will compare such evidence with funerary inscriptions and historical sources.

 Toys, Trinkets and Treasures: Child Burials in the Durius River Valley (Iberia)
Henry Clarke – University of Leeds    

Late Iron Age and early Roman period burial assemblages from the Durius Valley which ostensibly contain toys (e.g. rattles, marbles and game tokens) are often considered children’s graves. The same is true of assemblages which include miniaturised objects which seem to replicate the adult world on the relative scale of the child’s. However, osteological analysis has only securely identified the age of the deceased in some cases. Moreover, many of these objects are also found in the graves of known adults. How then are we to use these burials confidently as evidence of the lived experiences of children in this region? This paper will re-evaluate the purported material culture of childhood identified from burials in the Durius Valley. It will draw on recent insights into material agency and from sensory archaeology to reconsider what these objects could do, as well as the cultural significance that might have been attached to them. It will explore how far we can use this material culture to identify the treatment of children as a distinct social group, whether these items were perceived differently in life and in death, and how far they might reveal the identities of the deceased individuals they were buried with.

 Tracing children through material culture in the funerary context of Roman-period Slovenia
Kaja Stemberger Flegar – PJP d.o.o. Arheološko podjetje

In this paper I am going to address certain groups of material culture through which one can trace children in the funerary setting. Children have been studied to a limited extent in Slovenian archaeology. While osteological analyses have only become a standardised part of post-excavation procedures in the last two decades, there is a vast amount of older published material for which the biological data is missing. I will re-examine these datasets for objects known from external parallels and ancient sources to indicate the presence of children of different age groups. We know from the writings of ancient authors that the rules for burying were different for children and adults, influencing among other aspects the choice of grave goods. From the burials of Roman-period Slovenia, two major groups emerge in regard to artefacts commonly considered to be associated with children. The larger group contained apotropaic items that varied in terms of material, shape, and supposed magical attributes. The less numerous and less studied group of burials included feeding bottles, and have in similar contexts been interpreted as infant graves across the Empire.

 Roman Childhood on the “Catarinella” Askos: Mourning, Social Integration, and Subadult Agency
Christian Heitz – Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck        
Matthias Hoernes – Universität Wien

In order to understand children as active participants in lived religion and in the communities of early Roman southern Italy, this paper focuses on the so-called “Catarinella” askos, variously dated between the 3rd and the first half of the 1st century BCE. This unique painted vessel from Lavello (Basilicata) depicts a funerary ceremony with children serving as musicians and interacting with the corpse. The paper argues that pre-adult community members, though barely visible as such in the region’s burial record, were integrated in administering funerary ceremonies, expressing grief and mourning, and performing practices of lamentation. To make this case, the paper contextualises the askos within the figurative repertoire of southern Italy, drawing on 4th-century funerary paintings from Campania and terracotta figurines from tombs in 4th- and 3rd-century northern Apulia, but also on earlier Italic depictions and later Roman parallels. By emphasising the interplay of Italic, Greek and Roman traditions, it situates the pictorial evidence provided by the “Catarinella” askos in the context of the profound political, cultural and ritual changes that took place in Daunia during the Middle and Late Republican periods.

 When breast isn’t best; alternative infant feeding practices in Roman Britain 
Kayt Hawkins – University College London; Archaeology South-East        
Julie Dunne – University of Bristol

All mothers at some point make a decision about how to feed their baby, decisions influenced by social and cultural factors. Alongside maternal breast-feeding and wet nursing, the use of small, spouted, ceramic vessels to provide replacement or supplementary foodstuffs in the Roman period has been proposed by various researchers. Whereas such vessels have a long history in other geographical regions, no such prehistoric equivalents are known from Britain, where the earliest occurrences date to the mid-late 1st century AD. Scientific analysis on continental prehistoric vessels have revealed traces of dairy-based contents, interpreted as evidence for replacement breastfeeding (Rebay-Salisbury et al 2021), yet recent organic residue analysis of some Romano-British vessels have produced mixed ruminant and diary lipid traces, indicating a different or adapted manner of use. This paper will explore the possible implications of these results, in conjunction with a review of the vessels production, distribution and final placement within infant burials.

Bibliography:
Rebay-Salisbury, K., Dunne, J., Salisbury, R.B., Kern, D., Frisch, A., Evershed, R.P. 2021. Feeding Babies at the Beginnings of Urbanization in Central Europe. Childhood in the Past 14(2): 102-124. DOI: 10.1080/17585716.2021.1956051

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