osteoarchaeology

Motherhood and Feminism are not Dirty Words: Reimagining Archaeological Practice

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For International Women’s Day, I wanted to reflect on some of my old and new writings on the intersection of motherhood and archaeology.

Gendered and intersectional inequities shape access, safety, and participation within field‑based research in archaeology and biological anthropology. Compounding these issues, mothers* routinely confront discrimination and structural barriers associated with pregnancy, breastfeeding, childcare, and norms embedded in fieldwork culture. I have written on some of these issues here on challenges of research and fieldwork with children, attending conferences, and sexism in academic archaeology.

Systemic barriers place disproportionate pressure on mothers compared with fathers, contributing to reduced working hours and widening gender pay gaps (Kleven et al. 2018). The “leaky pipeline” in STEM—arguably a burst main—is strongly linked to caregiving responsibilities; evidence suggests more male STEM leaders have children compared with female leaders (McCabe et al. 2024). Although biological anthropology (including bioarchaeology) is numerically dominated by women, inequities persist in leadership, conference participation, and grant funding (Casad et al., 2022; Turner et al. 2018). Fieldwork remains a particularly acute site of inequality, with persistent reports of discrimination, harassment, and complex logistics for pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childcare (Camp, 2019; Hodgkins & Thompson 2022).

Archaeology’s professional identity is closely tied to fieldwork. Extended time away from home, the physical demands of excavation, and colonial “frontier” narratives have long shaped a disciplinary culture associated with masculine ideals (Tomášková 2007; Moser 2007). In 2013, the Society for American Archaeology established a Task Force on Gender Disparities in Archaeological Grant Submissions; the 2017 report found that nearly all women cited conflicts between fieldwork and parenting that negatively affected their grant submissions (Goldstein et al. 2018). While geography has more thoroughly addressed parenthood and fieldwork (Hope et al. 2019; Jenkins 2020; Price & Hall 2024), archaeology is only recently building momentum through personal accounts, op‑eds, and blog posts (e.g., Halcrow 2017; Hodgkins & Palmer; Norton 2025; Hoag & Von Jena 2025). This expanding body of narrative scholarship coincides with a stagnation in formal gender‑equity research in archaeology (Tomášková 2007; Fladd et al. 2026; Moen 2017; Wylie 2007). 

Centring Mothers in Feminism

O’Reilly (2021) argues that despite the diversification of feminist theory—such as queer feminism, third‑wave feminism, womanism, ecofeminism—academic feminism has not sufficiently centred the specific needs of mothers. This omission has contributed to the conflation of mothering and motherhood; to misreadings that equate matricentric feminism with gender essentialism or maternalism; and to the rise of postmaternal thinking and “radical forgetting,” whereby earlier maternal‑oriented activism is dismissed in favour of a degendered feminism (hooks 1984; Stephens 2016; O’Reilly 2021). Based on decades of research and conversations with mothers,  O’Reilly (2021) contends that mothering is central to many women’s identities and must be integrated into gendered models of society.

Accordingly, matricentric feminism “puts motherhood at its centre,” treating mothers, mothering, and motherhood as topics deserving sustained inquiry and as a basis for research and activism that contest oppressive institutions and envision empowering maternal identities and practices (O’Reilly 2021).

I have started to use personal narrative as disciplinary critique within a matricentric feminist lens. Caring responsibilities generate distinct vulnerabilities but also unique insights and forms of relational engagement in the field. Here are some reflections and recommendations to reconfigure archaeological practice so that it meaningfully includes and empowers mothers and in particular single parents:

Over 20 years, I have encountered the good, the bad, and the ugly. I have faced blatant discrimination—including being removed from a field project due to pregnancy—and I have missed opportunities because of assumptions about motherhood. Yet I have also experienced meaningful support and inclusion. The following reflections synthesise lessons learned: 

  • Find a mentor who is inclusive, supportive, and able to communicate openly about your needs. 
  • Motherhood can enrich scholarship. Parenting has deepened my perspectives on embodiment, ethics, and the social worlds of my research. 
  • Children expand field relations. My children often helped build rapport with communities, facilitating trust and dialogue. 
  • Collaborate with other parents. See Lozano & Sánchez (2023) for an example of practical strategies for conducting fieldwork as scientist mothers. 
  • Advocate for equity in fieldwork opportunities within institutions and professional bodies. 
  • Share your story when possible; narrative accounts help normalise motherhood in the field and push disciplinary boundaries. 
  • Expand the evidence base. More systematic qualitative and quantitative studies are needed to understand and address inequities. 

The COVID period, combined with reflections on well‑being and caregiving—including supporting an adult child with disabilities—prompted me to pivot toward collections‑based research, working with human remains already within my department. This shift has produced new grants and collaborations. This trajectory aligns with my ethical commitments and reframes success around work that makes a difference—challenging assumptions about what counts as “fieldwork” and broadening bioarchaeology’s remit to include historically contextualised human remains in collections. 

From Personal Narrative to Change: What Societies and Institutions Can Do

Archaeology presents distinctive barriers for parents, and in particular, single parents, because career progression is closely tied to excavation seasons, mobility, and extended time away from home. Academic societies are uniquely positioned to lead practical and cultural change. The following actions outline feasible reforms: 

1) Reform field school and excavation expectations
  • Accredit alternative training pathways (lab, museum, digital archaeology, community archaeology).
  • Recognise local/short‑duration excavations as equivalent experience.
  • Encourage hybrid models (e.g., remote recording). 
2) Fund childcare and caregiver travel for field seasons
  • Introduce seasonal childcare bursaries, not just conference childcare.
  • Create grants for caregiver travel and family‑suitable accommodation. Even small funds can make participation viable, especially where field pay is low or unpaid. 
3) Publish family-inclusive excavation guidelines
  • Standards for family‑safe accommodation, sanitation, and security.
  • Predictable scheduling where possible.
  • Risk assessments that include dependents.
  • Guidance for breastfeeding, pumping, and infant care in field settings. Comparable inclusion toolkits exist in other field sciences; archaeology needs discipline‑wide standards. 
4) Build mentorship networks for archaeologist parents
  • Cross‑career mentorship programmes.
  • Panels with excavation directors who are caregivers.
  • Practical guides (e.g., “How I ran a dig with kids”). 
5) Support local and community archaeology pathways
  • Fund micro‑grants for local projects and distributed collaborations that reduce mobility burdens.
6) Advocate for systemic funding changes
  • Lobby for dependent‑care costs to be eligible grant expenses.
  • Parental‑leave extensions aligned with excavation seasons.
  • Paid field school placements to reduce inequity. 

*Following O’Reilly (2021), the term ‘mothers” refers here to those who are doing the mothering and ‘motherwork’, as defined by Sara Ruddick (1989) as maternal practice, and can be undertaken by people other than biological mothers.

Two children standing next to a large megalith in a grassy area with trees and mountains in the background.

Visit to the Plain of Jars, Laos PDR.

A woman in a black shirt organizes items in green storage bins while a young girl in a pink shirt sits in one of the bins, watching intently.

Packing human burials away with some ‘help’

SSCIP Annual Conference – University of Otago, New Zealand 2021 – Registration and conference schedule

Posted on by childhoodbioarchaeology

A reminder that the 13th Annual SSCIP Conference is being held via Zoom from the 25th to 28th of October (British Summer Time). It is hosted and organised by Associate Professor Siân Halcrow of the University of Otago, New Zealand, and has been scheduled into eight short sessions over four days to accommodate the different time zones of participants.

Keynote addresses will be made by Professor Maureen Carroll of the University of York, Associate Professor Alison Behie of Australian National University, Professor Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island, and Professor Sarah Knott of Indiana University Bloomington.

If you are interested in attending any of the eight sessions you can register for free using the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/society-for-the-study-of-childhood-in-the-past-conference-tickets-179748280947. After you register you will be sent a confirmation email. Zoom details for the event can be found by clicking the “View the event” button in this email.

Information regarding the conference schedule and abstracts for all the talks can be found at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TqiAhXRo9NEiHPqTD1_OxOgh-wxf4dt0_jcIHQaWG2Y/edit?usp=sharing

Session times:

Day One / 25th October 2021 – Session One: 8am – 10am BST

Day One / 25th October 2021 – Session Two: 9pm – 10pm BST

Day Two / 26th October 2021 – Session One: 8am – 10am BST

Day Two / 26th October 2021 – Session Two: 9pm – 10pm BST

Day Three / 27th October 2021 – Session One:  8am – 10am BST

Day Three / 27th October 2021 – Session Two: 9pm – 11pm BST

Day Four / 28th October 2021, Session One: 8am – 10am BST

Day Four / 28th October 2021 – Session Two: 9pm – 11pm BST

Childhood and the development of urbanisation

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The collection of papers in this special issue of Childhood in the Past edited by Francesca Fulminante showcase research on infancy and childhood with sophisticated theoretical and methodological approaches to this topic. This issue represents a significant contribution to understanding the role of children and childhood during the transition to urbanization in Europe through the lens of multiple approaches, including bioarchaeological, archaeological, cognitive developmental (palaeoanthropological), sociological and historical research on infants and children, using a variety of new analytical techniques. This issue moves chronologically from the consideration of cognitive development during prehistory to the nineteenth-century urban environment. Check it out!

Moulded terracotta, beige clay with inclusions, H 9,3 cm, W 6 cm, Veii, sanctuary of Campetti 1, Rome, Museo Nazionale etrusco di Villa Giulia, inv. n. C/168. 3rd–2nd c. BCE. See Pedrucci 2021, 236, Veii 60. Courtesy of the Museum. © Mauro Benedetti.

Uncovering childhood in museums

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Personal Reflections By Amanda Hoogestraat, Twitter @AmehAnthro

On my recent tour of museums in the UK, I saw small reminders of children in the exhibits featuring past societies. Children were obviously a part of every community, but are underrepresented in museum collections. There is a museum devoted to childhood in both London and Edinburgh, but perhaps other museums should consider adding more children’s items to their collections for a more balanced representation of life in the communities it displays.

For many of the museums that had childhood material culture, shoes or cradles were the only items on view.

Four out of the 55 museums that I visited had children’s skeletal remains on display; usually infants and mostly with an adult skeletons nearby. Rarely did I see older children.

However, it was the toys that interested me the most; to see how the cherished play items were very similar to those of today.

I also observed how visiting children interacted with the exhibits, especially at museums not designed specifically for them. Some of these museums had created play areas pertaining to a display nearby.

Surprisingly, the British Motor Museum was a place that had children’s programs and school tours.

I think everyone enjoys seeing items from a childhood different from our own lives or from our own childhoods. It reminds us that across time and location, children were an integral part of the society.

Egyptian ‘hawk’ mummy is a human foetus with a fatal birth defect

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Recently researchers have made an unexpected discovery of a mummified foetus while CT scanning a 2300-year-old mummy known as Ta-Kush currently held at the Maidstone Museum in Kent. This coffin was labelled, “A mummified hawk with linen and cartonnage, Ptolemaic period (323 BC – 30 BC).”

Micro-CT scan shows the mummified stillborn human baby. Image: Maidstone Museum UK/Nikon Metrology UK

The high resolution CT scan results have recently been presented at the Extraordinary World Congress on Mummy Studies in the Canary Islands last month. The authors argue that the foetus was about 23-28 weeks gestation and had anencephaly as shown by underdeveloped skull bones.

To me, this begs the question as to whether the several other Egyptian ‘hawk’ mummies curated around the world are actually tiny babies. Further investigation of this baby and others will shed light on the social responses of grief and loss of those born too young to survive.

Watch here on YouTube Mummy ‘bird’ mystery

The coffin. Image: Western University

 

 

 

 

 

Stressed-out mums and demanding children: understanding the maternal – infant interface at the beginnings of agriculture

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Modern society is rooted in a dependency on agriculture. Although this is often thought to be a positive human development, the transition to agriculture-based societies had substantial negative impacts on human health, many of which continue to affect millions of people today. The bulk of these negative impacts are borne by the most vulnerable in society – mothers and children.

Recent research in the Arica region in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile is giving us new insight into how the roots of this transition to agriculture in prehistory affected human society, in particular mothers and their infants. Our research collaboration between the University of Otago in New Zealand, the University of Tarapacá Chile, and Durham University in England is using a multidisciplinary approach to reveal a picture of stresses associated with food shortages, and their possible connections to premature death and vitamin deficiencies in newborn babies.

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The Atacama Desert is well-known for the earliest evidence in the world for deliberate mummification of the dead, predating Egyptian mummies by more than two millennia. The intricate funerary rituals associated with the pre-agricultural Chinchorro people of this area were largely focused on infants and children. This has led some to hypothesise that it was a social response to high rates of foetal, infant and maternal death in these populations. Historically, archaeological research in the Atacama has focused on these pre-agricultural mummies, but recent research has highlighted periods of increasing infant mortality later in prehistory – during the transition to agriculture. The ultimate causes of this increase in stress, however, have eluded archaeologists.

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The project took a two-pronged approach to this problem, studying changes to diet using chemical signatures in bones and teeth, and assessing their health impacts by looking for signs of pathology on the skeletons of early agricultural populations. Published recently in the International Journal of Paleopathology, and covered here, an Early Formative Period site just transitioning to agriculture (3,600-3,200 years before present) showed that all the infants have evidence of scurvy (nutritional vitamin C deficiency). Interestingly, so did an adult female found buried with her probable unborn child. First author Anne Marie Snoddy says “In addition to contributing to knowledge of the interplay between environment, diet, and health in the Ancient Atacama, this paper provides the first direct evidence of potential maternal-foetal transference of a nutritional deficiency in an archaeological sample”.

This study also used new methods for analysing diet and stress using the chemistry of bones and teeth, these also reveal a picture of early-life stress recently published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and covered by Forbes.  “The preservation of mummies in the Atacama gives us an unprecedented opportunity to use tooth chemistry to look at prehistoric infant experience. We have chemical evidence of stress from tissues which form even before the infant is born, showing how the mother’s health is impacting her baby” says author Charlotte King. This work contributes to an understanding of the sensitive relationship between the health of the mother and infant in the past, including the maternal-infant transference of stress signals and micronutrient deficiencies.

 

Halcrow Anne Marie Snoddy Custom

Anne Marie Snoddy doing her palaeopathological analyses in the Museo Universidad de Tarapacá San Miguel de Azapa, Arica, Chile.

 

The research is giving new insight into human adaptation to one of the harshest environments in the world. The Atacama Desert experiences less than 2 mm per year of rainfall, making agricultural resources very vulnerable. However, the marine environment is remarkably rich, owing to the upwelling of the cold Humboldt ocean current, resulting in an abundance of marine mammals and fish. Chemical analysis is showing that the people of the desert buffered themselves against the vulnerability of their agricultural resources by continued reliance on these marine foods. Even so, periodic food shortages from El-Niño events in the area were likely, and the skeletal evidence for vitamin C deficiency is interpreted as being related to these events.

A version of this story was originally published here.

 

 

 

Snap-shots of research: Personhood of perinates in the past

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This month we are featuring Dr Tracy Betsinger who is an Associate Professor from SUNY Oneonta. Prior to joining SUNY Oneonta, Dr. Betsinger held a post-doctoral research position with the Global History of Health Project at Ohio State University.

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Tracy working on a perinate from the post-medieval Drawsko collection, Poland (while pregnant with a fetal skeleton shirt on!).

Tell me a little bit about your work:

I’m a bioarchaeologist interested in patterns of health (in general) and infectious disease, particularly treponemal disease, the effects of cultural factors such as status and urbanization on health, and the relationship between mortuary patterning/treatment and identity/personhood, especially among perinates. I work on materials from a variety of contexts, including prehistoric populations from eastern Tennessee and medieval and post-medieval populations from Poland.

How did you get into your field and why?

My interest in perinatal mortuary patterning was a fortuitous happenstance. While working with a colleague, Dr. Amy Scott, on post-medieval Polish materials, we noted the fairly large number of perinatal remains, many of which were well preserved (several with the tympanic rings in place!). We were examining other mortuary patterns at the time, when we decided to investigate the perinatal mortuary pattern to determine whether it matched older subadults or was distinct in some way. We also explored what this might mean in terms of their personhood and identity. The more I began to research perinates, perinatal mortuary patterns, and ontology, the more intrigued I became. I shared my research with a cultural anthropologist in my department (Dr. Sallie Han) whose research is focused on pregnancy and we found much common ground! The result of this was a four-fields anthropology of fetuses, initially an American Anthropological Association session and now a soon-to-be in-press edited volume.

What is on the future horizon for your research?

More recently, I have begun exploring perinatal mortuary treatment with the prehistoric populations from Tennessee. This work is just beginning, but I’m hoping to explore perinatal mortuary patterns/personhood temporally and geographically in the region and dovetail that information about what we know is going on health-wise in East Tennessee. My colleagues (Dr. Michaelyn Harle, Dr. Maria O. Smith) and I have only completed some general assessments of perinates, but so far, there seems to be a consistency in their treatment with older subadults and across time and space. We are planning more nuanced analyses of their mortuary treatment and are hoping to analyze remains for bacterial bioerosion with the hopes of identifying stillbirths from live births.

Take a sneak peek at our new resource on the “Bioarchaeology of Childhood” coming soon to Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies

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We have a forthcoming large annotated bibliography on the Bioarchaeology of Childhood coming soon to Oxford Bibliographies online. Take a sneak peek here. This will be useful to all bioarchaeology and human osteoarchaeology students, and academics for research and teaching. Please contact me here to request a personal copy.

Note that this is now published online

Halcrow, Siân E.; Ward, Stacey M. “Bioarchaeology of Childhood.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies. Ed. Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

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