Editorial

Welcome to the Spring issue of Volume fourteen of Childhood in the Past, the journal of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP). It has been a tumultuous year for all of us because of the Covid-19 pandemic and many of the Society’s planned activities had to be cancelled, most notably our annual conference that was to be held in the Italian Archaeological School in Athens, Greece. Nevertheless, behind the scenes, the committee has been busy planning for the future. You may have noticed our revamped website (https://sscip.org.uk), whose production was overseen by our President, Katie Hemer, working with SSCIP Secretary, Sophie Newman, and which we hope will be a valuable resource for our members. We held our first SSCIP social event on the afternoon of Wednesday 27th January 2021 and plans are also underway for a new online lecture series.

We were fortunate that it was possible to run one of our outreach events before the first lockdown came into force in March 2020. SSCIP teamed up with the Young Archaeologists’ Club (YAC, Council for British Archaeology) and English Heritage to deliver an outreach session on Saturday 29th February 2020 for 14- to 25-year-olds as part of the ‘Shout Out Loud’ project in the morning, while a training session for YAC leaders took place in the afternoon. Both sessions were led by Kirsty Squires and Esme Hookway and the event was held at St. Peter’s Church, Barton-upon-Humber, in North Lincolnshire, England.

We are intending to host the annual SSCIP conference in the Autumn and this will be organized by Siân Halcrow of the University of Otago, New Zealand. The format of the conference, however, remains to be decided at the time of writing and it will depend on government guidelines related to Covid-19. Details will be posted on the SSCIP website in due course. A SSCIP session will also be held as part of the 27th annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists which will take place remotely this September. The session is entitled ‘Tracing Baptism in the Archaeological Record’ and has been organized by Colm Donnelly (Queen’s University Belfast), Mark Guillon (UMR 5199 Bordeaux University), Emilie Portat (Paris Nanterre University) and myself.

We have had some changes in relation to Childhood in the Past, and our long-standing Book Reviews’ Editor, Simon Mays, stepped down from this position which he had held since 2008. Siân Halcrow, University of Otago, New Zealand, is our new Book Reviews’ Editor, while Simon has joined the ranks of esteemed colleagues in the field of children and childhood in the past and becomes a Vice-President of SSCIP.

We are delighted to report that 2020 saw the publication of our first SSCIP monograph with Archaeopress, and the ninth in our monograph series – Ages and Abilities: The Stages of Childhood and Their Social Recognition in Prehistoric Europe and Beyond (edited by Katharina Rebay-Salisbury and Doris Pany-Kucera). A review of the monograph is contained in this issue and it is available Open Access on the SSCIP website. Other volumes in the pipeline include, Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices (edited by Eileen Murphy, Mélie Le Roy and Ian Gonzalez Alaña). We are always happy to receive proposals for future monographs and these should be submitted to Lynne McKerr, Queen’s University Belfast, General Editor of our Monograph Series, following the guidelines provided on the SSCIP website.

The issue starts with a thought-provoking invited piece by Claire Hodson who gave the Society’s biennial lecture in 2019. Her paper provides an overview of the latest approaches and techniques that can be applied in the study of archaeological fetal, perinatal and infant individuals. As Claire states, despite the sadly brief nature of their lives, it is important to include these very young individuals in our narratives of past societies.

The volume includes three research papers. I am the author of the first paper which continues the focus on the very young and explores maternal and infant death in medieval Ireland. The paper commences with a review of contemporary Irish historical sources relating to a range of issues, including treatment of pregnant women, abortion, post-mortem caesarean and the nature of herbal treatments used for female reproductive health issues. This is followed by an exploration of thirty potential direct maternal deaths recovered from fifteen Irish medieval burial grounds. The proportion maternal statistic is calculated and the age-at-death values of the women and their babies are assessed to help determine the nature of the obstetric complications that may have caused their deaths. An attempt is made to differentiate between death during pregnancy, the birthing process or shortly after delivery. The paper concludes that many pregnant women and their babies still remain invisible in the archaeological record for Ireland, but those who have been recognized appear to have suffered from the same array of obstetric complications faced by women today, but often survivable now due to modern medical intervention.

The second paper is by Cristina García-Moreno, Patricia Olga Hernández Espinoza and James T. Watson and explores childhood and the acquisition of identity in the Late Prehispanic Ónavas Valley of Sonora in Mexico. They discuss how a range of both active and passive forces relating to identity acquisition impact upon children. During younger childhood these were largely determined by the parents and their families but, as the child aged, the community could have an increased influence as part of broader enculturation processes. The authors examine these concepts through an exploration of social age categories in a skeletal population from the cemetery of El Cementerio. They argue that evidence for artificial cranial modification, dental modification, and the inclusion of specific funerary items reflects intersecting identities that can provide insights relating to social age and identity acquisition within the community.

Iryna Skubii’s paper focuses on toys and their consumer spaces during the 1920s and 1930s – the early Soviet period – in Ukraine. She explores the influences of communist ideology on toys and the role they were expected to have in the raising of a child. State actors dictated that toys should be practical, technical, unrelated to religion, and compatible with communist ideals. She also investigates the collective spaces made available so that children could play with state-regulated toys. A shortage of toys required children to make their own, using manuals, and guided by communist ideological adaption to economic and industrial limitations. She found that increasing militarization of the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s resulted in war toys becoming extremely popular. These appear to have been used as powerful tools in the politics of militarization prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

As is traditional, the issue ends with three reviews compiled by Siân Halcrow, our new Book Reviews Editor – The Earliest Europeans. A Year in the Life: Seasonal Survival Strategies in the Lower Palaeolithic, by Robert Hosfield; Ages and Abilities: The Stages of Childhood and their Social Recognition in Prehistoric Europe and Beyond, edited by Katharina Rebay-Salisbury and Doris Pany-Kucera; and Childhood in History. Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, edited by Reidar Aasgaard, Cornelia Horn and Oana Maria Cojocaru.