Abstract

While often overlooked, children play an important role in reconstructing human behaviour in the past. Analysing sub-adult skeletal material (and considering the context in which they come from) can provide vital information about: growth rates, developmental trajectory, population/demographic transitions, the place of children in society and personhood, and also can shed light on the general ‘health’ or disease load of a given population.

Diagnosing disease in children is notoriously difficult, as many conditions do not show up in the skeleton, or have very similar skeletal manifestations. Furthermore, there is much mis-information about what observed changes actually mean, and precisely how far we can take our interpretations. This talk will explore these ideas, providing suggestions for how we should move forward; a number of relevant cases studies from post-medieval Chichester, England, will also be discussed.