This edited volume is a welcome addition to the growing number of books on mothering and motherhood (e.g. Hackworth Petersen & Salzman-Mitchell Reference Hackworth Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell2012; O'Reilly Reference O'Reilly2014; Cooper & Phelan Reference Cooper and Phelan2017; Myers Reference Myers2017). Not only does the topic resonate with the life experience of many women in the discipline, but it is of wider interest for exploring the social conditions of biological reproduction as well as social configurations in general. The two meanings of motherhood, as detailed by Adrienne Rich (Reference Rich1997 [Reference Rich1976]: 13), encompass women's personal experiences, their powers of reproduction and their relationship to children, as well as motherhood as a social institution. Both warrant closer exploration by archaeologists and historians alike.
The collection of chapters in this book emerges from a seminar on ‘Maternities and Childhood’ organized in 2016 by two research groups, based at the University of Granada and the University of Oviedo, which were funded by significant Spanish research grants. The book includes chapters on Iberian prehistoric archaeology, classical archaeology, epigraphy, literature, and legal texts. It is almost exclusively written by authors based in Spain, and its main geographic focus on the Iberian Peninsula could have been reflected in the title of the book. Its placement in the monograph series of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past is more than fitting, warranting wide availability and distribution.
The Introduction by Margarita Sánchez Romero and Rosa Ma Cid López places research on motherhood and maternal practices within the feminist discourse. Paloma González Marcén's Chapter 2 on the Bronze Age child burial of Forat de Conqueta (Lleida, Catalunya) and its role as a closure deposit of a long-used funerary cave opens a set of papers based primarily on archaeological evidence. Learning, as a key process through which children acquire knowledge and skill to use certain technologies, is explored in Chapter 3 through pottery production in Bronze Age southeast Spain. Eva Alarcón García and colleagues discuss all the technical details of twenty-one small vessels from Peñalosa (Jaén, Andalusia), including organic residue analysis, and link them to the learning process of children. This link is perhaps not entirely convincing, as apart from skill level and size, there is no further evidence that children were indeed the producers of these vessels.
Agnès Garcia-Ventura (Ch. 4) considers motherhood in ancient Near Eastern sources, particularly the intriguing role of the nadītu women, who appear in early second millennium bc cuneiform texts. Traditionally defined as childless non-mothers dedicated to their religious and social obligations, the author considers them as non-biological mothers or childfree (i.e. voluntary childless) persons, who could evade what was expected of all other women—becoming a mother.
The chapter on maternal death among Phoenician and Punic communities across the Mediterranean by Ana Delgado Hervás and Aurora Rivera Hernández (Ch. 5) scrutinizes the funerary record for evidence of death during pregnancy and childbirth. Although maternal mortality is estimated at around fourteen per cent (p. 55), only nine instances of women buried with foetus in situ are known from this cultural context; the authors suggest deviant burial practices for women who died during pregnancy and childbirth. Literary and iconographic evidence from these communities place birthing firmly into the sphere of women. Representations of childbirth in the form of small amulets and votives, which depict women in a variety of birthing positions are particularly interesting.
Child burials of the early first millennium bc in Sicily are the topic of Meritxell Ferrer's contribution (Ch. 6), based on the cemeteries of Mokarta, Morgantina, and Polizzello. Children's remains are scarce in early rock-cut tombs used as family graves, and point to a funerary practice of excluding children—it remains open for discussion whether child burial took place in the settlements or other designated areas, or whether formal funerary rites extended to children at all. Most likely, this type of funerary structures was deemed unsuitable for children. At Polizzello, there is evidence that children's remains were buried in pits and pithoi in ritual enclosures closely related to the rock-cut chamber graves. The deposition of the remains of 120 children in one single event towards the end of the site's use is unusual and may be linked to an outbreak of disease (p. 82). The author concludes that the provision of care for the afterlife remained a key concern after the death of a child, even if archaeological evidence is sometimes missing.
Mireia López-Bertran investigates relations between children and animals, as well as shared ontologies in the Iron Age Western Mediterranean comparing two very interesting types of archaeological contexts (Ch. 7). The first consists of c. forty known Phoenician and Punic tophets—open air cremation child sanctuaries that include both the remains of new-borns and young children, and those of lambs and kids (perhaps the shared English term ‘kids’ for human children and young goats likewise reveals aspects of shared ontologies in our own Western society). To this day, it has not been possible to decide ultimately if children were indeed sacrificed in these places or if their burial represents a particular funerary rite following natural death. The second type of context scrutinized by López-Bertran is Iberian households of the fifth to third centuries bc, where new-borns and young animals are likewise sometimes found buried together. Iberian societies of the fourth to third centuries bc are the focus of Carmen Rueda Galán, Carmen Rísquez Cuenca, and Ana B. Herránz Sánchez in Chapter 8. They explore profane and ritual aspects of motherhood, as expressed—among others—through votive statues depicting rites of passage, reproductive organs, swaddled children, and mothers with children.
Four chapters address Greek antiquity. ‘Motherhood, Gender, and Identity in the Athenian polis’ (Ch. 9) by M. Dolors Molas Font sets aspects of the identity of the Athenian wife and mother against those that challenge this status: the lives of prostitutes, concubines, and foreign women. The theme of the legal status of the relationships between mothers and children in ancient Greece is continued in Laura Pepe's Chapter 11. The paternal linage was seen as the most significant, so much that children that did not have a father were considered orphans, even if they still had a mother. Nevertheless, Athenian citizenship laws required that both parents were Athenian, therefore, there could be no citizenship without a verified maternal lineage (p. 130). Hellenistic queens and the relationship to their sons is the topic of María Dolores Mirón Pérez's contribution (Ch. 12), which analyses the ways in which women were involved in networks of political power.
Susana Reboreda Morillo considers iconographic sources in her discussion of motherhood and childhood stages in ancient Greece (Ch. 10). She notes that there are no images of breastfeeding for the first stage of childhood until the age of three, but there are images of swaddled and naked children in the arms of the mother or a wet nurse. At three years, the Choes festival marked the transition to another childhood stage. Small wine jugs (choes) produced for the occasion and often found in funerary contexts bear images of young children playing with balls, dolls, and toys, and are important sources of information. Girls’ and boys’ ways of life were separated between the ages of seven and fourteen, and they are depicted in their respective gendered environments. It is interesting to learn from this chapter that material evidence emerges from specific ritual and domestic contexts but does not cover all aspects of childhood known from literary sources.
The following chapters focussing on Roman antiquity primarily consider epigraphic and literary sources on motherhood. Rosa Ma Cid López (Ch. 13) collected twenty funerary inscriptions commenting on mother-child relationships from the Iberian Peninsula in the first to third centuries ad. It emerges clearly from the reading of these documents that both girls and boys were cherished and loved by their parents, and their death was considered a significant loss. In addition, the documents testify to gender expectations that were different for girls and boys. The role of the mater civitatis is discussed by Almudena Domínguez-Arranz (Ch. 14). Wealthy women in the Roman Empire did not have considerable political power but could contribute to society through patronage, charity, and foundations for children. Giving was understood to honour the family and perpetuate its memory.
Childhood maintenance is the topic of a very insightful contribution by María Isabel Núñez Paz (Ch. 18), who uses sources on legal norms to understand how children's rights to food, housing, and education changed from Antoninus Pius to Justinian (ad 138–565). This is particularly relevant as concepts such as the ‘best interest of the child’ are increasingly recognized and continue to form an important part of our own societies’ understanding of the right and obligation to care for children.
Another very strong contribution in this section is the analysis of mother-child relationships in the Roman slave system by Carla Rubiera Cancelas (Ch. 16). Family ties between slaves were not normally respected, as slaves were treated as personal property. In household contexts, this became particularly dramatic if the slave owners did not make arrangements to free their slaves after death. The accounts of children as young as seven sold alone are heart-breaking. The section on breastfeeding, wet-nursing, and breeding of slaves is extremely short and leaves this reviewer wondering whether this specific topic would be worthy of more research.
Chapters on mothers and sons in Plutarch's Roman Parallel Lives (Borja Méndez Santiago, Ch. 15), on women in Latin love elegy (Rosa Mª Marina Sáez, Ch. 17), and the relationship of Iulia Mamaea and Alexander Severus (Pedro David Conesa Navarro, Ch. 19) cater to specialists’ interests. The provision of a translation for text sections quoted in Latin would have benefitted the reader whose education did not include Latin or whose classical training has become as rusty as mine; this would have rendered the collection more accessible to a general readership.
The last two chapters are concerned with representations of the past in present-day Spain. Silvia Medina Quintana (Ch. 20) outlines how women and children have been represented in primary school textbooks in the twentieth century and until today, whereas Antonia Garcia Luque (Ch. 21) presents strategies to overcome the male bias in the teaching of history.
With the breadth of topics covered, every reader will find something of interest in this volume, even if the contributions are of varied scholarly and editorial quality. The collection is perhaps not the easiest entry point to delve into the archaeology of motherhood, but with some prior knowledge, the volume offers some surprizing insights and new incentives for further research.
