| Abstract: |
The 19th century St. Thomas' Anglican churchyard in Belleville, Ontario, Canada is associated with a large and well-preserved infant skeletal collection (n = 149) and good-quality parish records that document interments in the graveyard (1821-1874). By using a combination of historical demographic and stable nitrogen isotope analyses on the parish records and skeletal remains, respectively, a general pattern of extended nursing for about 14 months, introduction of foods other than breast milk by around 5 months of age, and variation in breast-feeding and weaning behaviours were detected for St. Thomas' infants. The results demonstrate that it is possible to go beyond the concept of weaning age to explore the weaning process in past populations when appropriate and large samples of documentary and skeletal data are available. The biometric model is a demographic model for distinguishing breastfeeding from non-breastfeeding populations and for inferring weaning patterns from the age distribution of documented infant deaths dervied from sources such as parish or civil registers. The stable isotope method is based on the hypothesis that there is a stable and invariant linear relationship between age and cumulative infant mortality rates between 1 and 11 months of age, once a natural logarithmic function [log(n+1)\+3\+] has transformed age in days, where n= age in days. It was {Fogel et al 1989} that first presented information that indicated that nitrogen could be used to evaluate nursing and weaning from a study of nursing infants and their mothers based on fingernail clippings. This study used ribs and sample size was based on availability and attempted to maximize the number of infants and young children in the study. From the results, the slight flexion in the graph of the line around 5-6 months are age found in all three samples suggests that breast-fed babies were being introduced to non-breast milk foods to such an extent by this age that cumulative infant mortality increased in association with the process.
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