A Childhood Cut Short?: The Mortuary Analysis of Subadult Decapitation Burials in Western Roman Britain

The study of the lives of children in the ancient and more recent historical past has rapidly increased in the archaeological literature in the past three decades, providing a welcomed expansion of our understandings of the experiences of children. Drawing on textual, epigraphic, iconographic (Figure 1), material, and skeletal evidence in various cultural contexts (e.g. Baxter 2005; Crawford et al. 2018; Gowland 2001; Harlow and Laurence 2002; Rawson 2003), archaeologists explore the cultural construction of childhood and its defined stages through the life course approach. Studies in bioarchaeology have produced an increasing awareness of the significance of subadult remains to