Marginalized Motherhood: Infant Burial in 17th Century Transylvania

Summary

During the last four decades bioarchaeologists have enriched what we know about the lives of past people; however, many questions remain unexplored and understudied. Among these, the lived experiences of expectant mothers and their newborn infants have not received much attention in the bioarchaeological literature. Moreover, few scholars have attempted to understand how women who experienced a failed pregnancy or loss of a newborn infant have dealt with this reality, particularly in terms of belief systems about salvation and the afterlife. In this paper, we utilize a 17th century bioarchaeological context from eastern Transylvania to explore these questions in further detail. In 2007, archaeologists performed a salvage excavation in the Reform Church in the village of Telekfalva, located in present-day Romania. They recovered remains of 70 individuals, the majority of which were perinatal infants. The skeletons presented marked signs of physiological stress and offer some insight into the health and stress loads of the women who carried them. In addition, the careful placement of these infants under the floor of the community’s Reform Church offers powerful evidence about the importance of burial for even the youngest, and in some instances, never viable community members.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Bioarchaeology of Frontier and Borderlands

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