Bioarchaeology of Motherhood, Childhood and Infant Care in the Early Middle Ages
This PhD project explores how early medieval communities (6th–9th ct.) in today’s Upper Austria, a dynamic borderland between Frankish, Avar, and Slavic spheres, perceived childhood, motherhood and the parent-infant nexus. By examining burial sites through a bioarchaeological approach, it investigates how gender- and age-specific burial rites reflected social roles and identities and sheds light on the cultural perceptions of children and mothers. The study also compares regional burial patterns to reveal shifting concepts of childhood, explores how parents coped with infant death and will emphasize aspects of the female life cycle. Combining archaeology, anthropology, and social studies, it not only offers new insights into emotional life, structure and social dynamics of past communities but also introduces a biocultural approach to understand past conceptions of childhood and the social value of mothers in regions often overlooked due to the scarcity of existing written sources.
Jennifer Portschy studied Prehistory and Historical Archaeology as well as Art History at the University of Vienna. She further attended study programs at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and contributed to research and teaching at the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg. Her master’s thesis in archaeology focused on deviant burials of children and adolescents in Central Europe from Late Antiquity to the early modern period, with a special emphasis on the influence of individual grief on burial rites. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeologies at the University of Innsbruck. Jennifer has worked on various archaeological research projects and excavations and as a field archaeologist on rescue excavations in the context of cultural heritage preservation both in Austria and abroad. Her research focuses on funerary and social archaeology, paleopathology, and the interdisciplinary integration of cultural and natural sciences.
»Deviant Child Burials in Medieval Central Europe. Superstitions and Parental Grief Responses in the Context of Non-Normative Funerary Rites«, in: Abstract Book of the 3rd Virtual Conference for Women Archaeologists and Paleontologists, 6th–8th March 2023, p. 71.
with Orsolya Mateovics-László, Zsolt Nyárádi, Miklós Rácz, Barbara Hausmair, Special burial grounds for infants and babies in the medieval and early modern periods - Single occurrences or transregional phenomenon?, Poster at 30th EAA Annual Meeting in Rome, 28.–31.08.2024.