Rise of Children - part three
- Eszter Melis
- Apr 11
- 6 min read
According to the figures published by UNICEF in their 2024 Child Mortality report, the mortality rate of children under the age of five has fallen significantly by 52% since 2000. However, this decline has slowed since the turn of the millennium, and despite the progress that has been made over the past quarter century, 4.8 million children before reaching the age of five still die each year, including 2.3 million newborns. The risk of death today is still 1 month after birth. This trend has persisted throughout history and in the absence of modern medical knowledge, some estimates suggest that infant mortality may have reached up to one-quarter to one-third of all deaths in the past.
Neonatal deaths are defined as those occurring within the first 27 days of life and are attributed to a combination of genetic and maternal influences, including congenital anomalies, low birth weight, and birth trauma. Conversely, mortality between one month and one year of age (postneonatal) is predominantly attributable to external factors, including respiratory and digestive infections, particularly in communities where access to basic healthcare is constrained, such as vaccines and medicine. Additional critical factors include malnutrition, inadequate access to clean water and sanitation, and the hazards of conflict zones. In the past, these same factors were responsible for high infant mortality rates, coupled with the lack of buffering tools available through modern medicine. At the same time, misconceptions and superstitions about childcare have also significantly impacted child survival.
„So many countries, so many customs” – so the saying goes, and it's true, but it doesn't matter in which time we are living in a country. Data are scarce concerning the care and practices related to pregnancy, labour or infants during prehistoric periods. However, the situation is not entirely hopeless: objects from the Bronze Age, so-called breastfeeding vessels, have recently been found, which show that even then, people were trying to find alternative ways to make up for the lack of breast milk for their babies. However, it is still a question of how suitable the alternative food was for the child. Written records from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era reveal several customs, some of which are bizarre to us today. Based on the advice of midwives, older generations often used unthinkable ways of caring for babies. One such approach involved applying constricting swaddling in the first half-year of life, a practice that was adopted to facilitate the participation of women in the workforce. The swaddles, which did not allow the babies any movement, were changed only twice daily. Another harmful custom was the practice of wet nurseries, which was present in Roman times but was also widespread in 17th and 19th-century France, causing the death of many infants.
However, despite the carefully conducted cemetery excavations, the low proportion of infants is a common phenomenon in all periods, still, the remains of children of fetal age are even less, although premature births were probably higher than today and unwanted pregnancies may also have been common in the past.
Initially, the causes were explained by the difficulties of excavation, with a more porous structure of children's bones. However, it is now well-documented that fetal skeletons can be preserved in very good condition, as is the case with adult skeletons. A more significant challenge arises from the disturbance of cemeteries, particularly in the case of shallow graves, which is probably the case of fetal and neonatal remains. These remains can become commingled during the use of the cemetery, making it very difficult for the excavators to identify them. Neonatal remains are most likely recovered from female graves, which provide evidence of the risks involved in childbirth. Such remains are often found with the mother, placed next to it or either in an anatomical position within the pelvic region or between the legs, resulting from 'coffin birth', all as a consequence of the mother's death before the delivery. However, the number of such burials is also very small.
Consequently, it remains an unresolved question: Where have all the babies gone?
It has also long been assumed that these children were buried in places not used by the community, especially in Christian societies where burial in consecrated ground was only allowed in the case of baptism. During the Roman period, historical sources indicate that infant burials took place along roadsides and within the interiors of buildings, and the latter practice is also known from medieval sites. However, these are still isolated cases.
In recent years, there has been an increasing number of new and unexpected results in this search for answers regarding all historical periods. A notable finding in the field is the medieval practice of burying premature infants and newborns in sacred spaces despite the strict church regulations at the time that aimed to prevent such interments. A striking discovery of recent decades is the medieval practice of burying premature infants and newborns in sacred spaces, despite the strict ecclesiastical regulations.
Numerous sites in England and Ireland have already been discovered to contain group burials of foetuses and newborns, including within consecrated cemeteries. Also, in other parts of Europe, like Germany, Austria, Romania and Hungary, such burials have been recorded in chapels and churches. These sites are extraordinary because they have completely transformed the way we think about the attitudes of former societies towards early infant death, giving us a glimpse into the meaning of death and burial for people whose beliefs and attitudes were otherwise unknown to us or remained hidden.
In addition to providing answers to social and moral questions, the skeletal remains of fetuses and infants offer a more direct route to the biological study of maternity than the remains of the female individuals themselves. Fetal and infant remains have also become a focus of paleopathology, and the increasing number of studies demonstrates the scientific importance of these remains. Pathological conditions and alternative microanalytical methods can provide valuable information about early-life stress events and on mother-infant life history during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
Consequently, the broader social and cultural history of fetal and perinatal loss provides a valuable source of insight into the actions taken by the living in response to such deaths in the past, as well as for the study of the early stressors that significantly influenced human evolution. The opening lectures by Prof. Eileen Murphy and Prof. Barbara Hausmair will be linked to this period of life and discuss the social-archaeological background of its particular funerary evidence. Their presentations may also provide a deeper understanding of how we relate to the still-sensitive topic of premature and infant death in our society today.
And a short story about the Irish Cillíníes made by Terri Kearney. A notable example of how the past can be a part of the living:
References
Bethard, J.D., Osterholtz, A.J., Nyárádi, Zs., Gonciar, A. 2019. Marginalized Motherhood. Infant Burial in Seventeenth-Century Transylvania In Tica C.I., Martin DL (eds) Bioarchaeology of Frontiers and Borderlands, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 252-272.
Craig-Atkins, Elizabeth & Fissell, Mary E.. (2024) Marking maternity: Integrating historical and archaeological evidence for reproduction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries". The material body: Embodiment, history and archaeology in industrialising England, 1700-1850, edited by Elizabeth Craig-Atkins and Karen Harvey, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 47-80. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526152794.00009
Faragó, T. 2003. Csecsemőhalandóság Magyarországon a 18-20. században. [Infant mortality in Hungary in the 18th-20th centuries.] In Horváth, K. Zs., Lugosi, A. Sohajda, F. (eds.) Léptékváltó társadalomtörténet: tanulmányok a 60 éves Benda Gyula tiszteletére. Budapest, Hermész Kör Osiris pp. 446-474.
Halcrow, S. E., Tayles, N., & Elliot, G. E. (2017). The bioarchaeology of fetuses. In S. Han, T. K. Betsinger, & A. B. Scott (Eds.), The Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society. Berghahn Books, 83-111.
Kamp, K. A. (2001). Where Have All the Children Gone?: The Archaeology of Childhood. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 8(1), 1–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20177431
Lewis, M. (2017) Fetal paleopathology: an impossible discipline? In: Han, S., Betsinger, T. K. and Scott, A. B. (eds.) The Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society. Berghan Books, New York, 1-18. ISBN 9781785336911 Available at https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/51586/
Mateovics-László, O., Nyárádi, Zs., Rácz, M., Portschy, J., Hausmair, B. (2024) Special burial grounds for infants and babies in the medieval and early modern periods -Single occurrences or transregional phenomenon? https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.17978.81609
Mitchell, D.A. 2019. Where did all the babies come from? Investigating the Infant and Fetal Population in the Lower Horizon at St. Hilda’s. Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, MSC Thesis.
Murphy, E.M. (2011) Children’s Burial Grounds in Ireland (Cilliní) and Parental Emotions Toward Infant Death. Int J Histor Archaeol 15, 409–428. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-011-0148-8
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. https://doi.org/10.1080/17585716.2021.1956051
United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), Levels & Trends in Child Mortality: Report 2024 – Estimates developed by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, United Nations Children’s Fund, New York, 2025. 1-100. ISBN: 978-92-806-5636-7 https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2024/
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