An interdisciplinary exploration of the social impact of foetal and perinatal mortality during the industrialisation of England

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Recent archaeological excavations of urban cemeteries have driven ambitious agendas to engage with the social, cultural and economic transitions of industrialisation (Tarlow 2015; Nixon et al. 2002). The lives of women and children have come under new scrutiny in the writing of inclusive and representative narratives of health, occupation and family life. This project addresses a key objective from one research agenda - How does urbanisation affect family dynamics? (Powers 2015) - by focusing on the many infants who did not survive the hardships of Industrial-period life and whose loss appears to have been largely a private affair, overlooked by both historical narratives and archaeological studies. Funerary and osteological assessments of burials of Industrial-period infants appear in numerous reports arising from commercial archaeological excavations. This evidence has only recently begun to be integrated into synthetic research. Skeletal remains have been evaluated for delayed growth (Hodson 2018), and exposure to biological stress (Newman 2017), but a wider contextual narrative needs to be constructed - a social and cultural understanding of foetal and perinatal death. By focusing on the death rituals used to mediate loss and grief, a range of issues in the histories of family, reproduction and emotion (Murphy 2011; Tarlow 2000) can be examined through the lens of archaeologies of childhood (Crawford et al. 2018; Lilehammer 2015).This project will evaluate the impact of industrialisation on responses to foetal and perinatal loss, illuminating the effect of urbanisation on the 18th-19th century English family. 1. How were foetuses and perinates commemorated in urban cemeteries dating to the 18th-19th centuries compared to adults? To what extent did they appear in vaults, tombs, crypts and other different forms of burial?2. To what extent were the very young included/excluded from the burial community? How widespread were the spatial zoning of burials or 'clandestine' burials of infants in adult graves and what might these practices tell us about responses to death of young children?3. Did social status and religious affiliation affect the responses to foetal and infant loss in urban communities? 4. To what extent is there evidence for non-burial treatments of foetal and perinatal remains, for example abandonment or anatomisation, and what are the implications for perceptions of the value of very young lives? This project will capitalise on the wealth of recently-excavated materials to collate a dataset integrating funerary (burial form, spatial location, coffins and other forms of physical commemoration) and osteological evidence (age at death, pathological evidence of physiological stress, and congenital conditions). Materials will combine evidence from MOLA excavations (e.g. Bow Baptist, St Marylebone, Paddington St North, Sheen's Burial Ground) with collections at the University of Sheffield (St Hilda's, South Shields, Carver Street Methodist Chapel), extant reports (e.g. St Martin's, Birmingham; Coach Lane, North Shields) and data from new and ongoing excavations.Research methods will identify patterns in funerary practice and its provision to the very young dead, facilitated by cross reference of burial data with detailed evidence of life course parameters (e.g. precise estimations of age at death and health status) to illuminate the wider environment in which these children briefly lived. Critical integration of these archaeological data with historical evidence (Bills of Mortality, journalism, court records and midwifery literature) using theoretical understandings of the material body, funerary rites and emotions that facilitate a deep, interdisciplinary reading of the evidence will illuminate the nature of responses to infant loss, the motivations behind these responses and their wider relationships to life and death in an industrialising environment.