Abstract
This chapter examines the skeletal and historical evidence for the childhood experiences of infants. The focus in this chapter is on the structures of home and caregivers. A key topic for this age cohort is nutrition. Thus, access to food resources, weaning, and nutritional deficiencies are explored. Rates of rickets, scurvy, cranial lesions, and other pathologies are discussed. This chapter draws evidence for parenting trends from parenting manuals from the early nineteenth century. Causes of death from death records are examined in light of the historical literature as well. There are brief biographies from the historical records and osteobiographies from the skeletons that highlight the specific conditions and experiences detailed here.
Some time since, while looking over a file of old newspapers, I cast my eyes upon the obituaries, and was forcibly impressed with the great proportion of children who are yearly consigned to the relentless grave under the age of 2Â years. It evolved in my mind why it was so, and could not avoid concluding that it must be in some great measure occasioned by some gross mismanagement in mothers or nurses, or perhaps both.
—Mary Hunt Palmer Tyler (1811)
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Notes
- 1.
This document was found among the letters of the Rev. Ludlow held in the Frey Family Papers at the Fenimore Art Museum Research Library in Cooperstown, NY. The primary documents from this time period are letters from the Rev. Ludlow to his mother and his sister. Occasionally, a document from his sister’s husband, John Frey , turns up in the files.
- 2.
Along with IV-A and IV-DDD , three other cases of this widespread cortical bone porosity from rickets are present among the infants.
- 3.
There is a discrepancy in Tyler’s advice; at one point, she recommends weaning take place by 12 months and later says to breastfeed until 2 years of age. It is possible that her earlier recommendation may be for the beginning of weaning rather than the cessation of weaning.
- 4.
Dropsy was a medical term used to refer to any swelling of soft tissue.
- 5.
It is not a statistically significant decline, however.
- 6.
Teeth also had to be complete and preserved well enough for an age estimation to be made.
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Ellis, M.A.B. (2019). Hearth and Home: Infants, Birth Through 1.5 Years of Age. In: The Children of Spring Street. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92687-2_3
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