Overview

Despite the developing emphasis in current scholarship on children in Roman culture, there has been relatively little research to date on the role and significance of the youngest children within the family and in society. This volume singles out this youngest age group, the under one-year-olds, in the first comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood to encompass the Roman Empire as a whole: integrating social and cultural history with archaeological evidence, funerary remains, material culture, and the iconography of infancy, it explores how the very particular historical circumstances into which Roman children were born affected their lives as well as prevailing attitudes towards them. Examination of these varied strands of evidence, drawn from throughout the Roman world from the fourth century BC to the third century AD, allows the rhetoric about earliest childhood in Roman texts to be more broadly contextualized and reveals the socio-cultural developments that took place in parent-child relationships over this period. Presenting a fresh perspective on archaeological and historical debates, the volume refutes the notion that high infant mortality conditioned Roman parents not to engage in the early life of their children or to view them, or their deaths, with indifference, and concludes that even within the first weeks and months of life Roman children were invested with social and gendered identities and were perceived as having both personhood and value within society.

Full Product Details

9780191841804

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""This useful book offers a broad, readable overview of the evidence for the youngest Romans-children less than one year old-from the fourth century BCE to the fourth CE across the Empire...Recommended"" -- CHOICE ""This poignant and affecting book provides an eye-opening account of the very earliest stages of life in the Roman Empire."" -- Current World Archaeology ""Carroll impressively compiles the material evidence of infancy and early childhood in the Roman empire (and before). To be able to compose a work of this nature, requires years of speciali-zation and experience from the field, making Carroll the ideal scholar for the undertaking. The book has value both as a source book on the material evidence of earliest childhood and as an exhaustive research on the matter. Carroll's work is thus invaluable to anyone interested in early childhood in antiquity and especially for those not working with the material evidence directly."" -- Roosa Kallunki, Arctos"

This useful book offers a broad, readable overview of the evidence for the youngest Romans-children less than one year old-from the fourth century BCE to the fourth CE across the Empire...Recommended -- CHOICE This poignant and affecting book provides an eye-opening account of the very earliest stages of life in the Roman Empire. -- Current World Archaeology Carroll impressively compiles the material evidence of infancy and early childhood in the Roman empire (and before). To be able to compose a work of this nature, requires years of speciali-zation and experience from the field, making Carroll the ideal scholar for the undertaking. The book has value both as a source book on the material evidence of earliest childhood and as an exhaustive research on the matter. Carroll's work is thus invaluable to anyone interested in early childhood in antiquity and especially for those not working with the material evidence directly. -- Roosa Kallunki, Arctos

""This useful book offers a broad, readable overview of the evidence for the youngest Romans-children less than one year old-from the fourth century BCE to the fourth CE across the Empire...Recommended"" -- CHOICE ""This poignant and affecting book provides an eye-opening account of the very earliest stages of life in the Roman Empire."" -- Current World Archaeology ""Carroll impressively compiles the material evidence of infancy and early childhood in the Roman empire (and before). To be able to compose a work of this nature, requires years of speciali-zation and experience from the field, making Carroll the ideal scholar for the undertaking. The book has value both as a source book on the material evidence of earliest childhood and as an exhaustive research on the matter. Carroll's work is thus invaluable to anyone interested in early childhood in antiquity and especially for those not working with the material evidence directly."" -- Roosa Kallunki, Arctos

Author Information

Maureen Carroll, Professor of Roman Archaeology, University of Sheffield Maureen Carroll is Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Sheffield and is also a founding member of its Centre for the Archaeology of Childhood. She studied Classical Archaeology in Canada, the USA, and Germany, and was the recipient of the prestigious Balsdon Fellowship and the Hugh Last Fellowship at the British School at Rome in 2008 and 2016 respectively. She has published widely on infant death and burial in Roman Italy, on Roman funerary commemoration, and on Roman gardens, and has conducted excavations at major sites in the Roman world, including Pompeii and Vagnari in Italy and Cologne in Germany.

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