The Unusual Grave of a Loved Child

There are numerous burials inside the former south wing of the cloister or ‘ambitus’ south of Ribe Cathedral. This is the first well preserved children’s graves that we have excavated. It is a very young infant buried sometime around 1700 AD. The grave is about 30 by 60 cm, the body itself less than 50 cm.

In this close-up of the lower body (seen from the north) you can see remains of a wooden coffin lid with the remains intertwined metal string and some needle pins on top.

It’s not clear what exactly we’re looking at here, but it is quite possibly the remains of a decorated piece of garment. Obviously someone dressed the grave with great care.

Small bronze pins are found lying around above the skeleton as can be seen in this picture of the head. Againg we see curled and twisted metal strings and a few pins:

The bones of the skull are not even close to growing together into one piece which reveals the very young age of this individual.

Usually, the number of infant burials in pre-modern societies don’t correspond well with the demographics of such societies, that is you’d expect a lot more child burials than are actually found by archaeologists. Taphonomic processes may alter and destroy biological remains after they are buried in the ground. Some remains survive better than others over time and can therefore heavily bias the excavated collection. As the bones of children are small and fragile they will often decay faster than the bones of adults.

But the lack of children in medieval graveyard can only partially be ascribed to taphonomy. The degree of preservation can vary enormously - even within the same grave - and so it becomes clear that there must be something else going on (yet I’m not completely convinced by Langers claim that infanticide or ‘exposure’ (a euphemism for leaving the newborn child to die out in the wild) was practised “on gigantic scale with absolute impunity” and “noticed by writers with most frigid indifference”¹ ).

Rather, I like to think of the burial of children as something which is still poorly understood by archaeologists.