Child labour a curse of the ages

We mostly know about Victorian children working 12-hour days down mines, sweeping chimneys, or toiling in sweatshops. Archaeologists meeting at Barcelona last month report that kids have toiled hard for at least 3000 years.

The researchers report on the discovery of a child-sized leather cap and child-sized tiny picks in a 3000-year-old salt mine in Austria – evidence of children working underground.

In France, archaeologist Melie Le Roy found cylindrical grooves in fossil teeth of two children between the ages of 1 and 9.

She thinks 3000 years ago, these children were employed to strip leaves or soften animal fibre with their teeth to make string for use in sewing or weaving. It seems that children were put to work as soon as they could walk.

Archaeologist Povilas Blazevicius finds that

10 per cent of the bricks and roof tiles from a 14thcentury Lithuanian castle bore the fingerprints of 8 to 13-year-old children.

Examining hundreds of ceramic shards made in a 15th-century village in Canada, Dr Steven Dorlan found they carried tiny fingernail marks of children aged 6 or younger who must have been used to shape the inner surfaces of clay pots.

Every country in Europe put children to hard work before the 20th century. The Swedes, Finns, Germans and Swiss put children to work for long hours on farms or in workhouses, mills and mines, and in clothing and footwear factories.

In the United States, children under 10 also worked 10 hours a day on farms, in mines and canneries, or rolling cigarettes.

In Britain, labour reforms were a long time coming. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was established in 1824, but not until 1884 was the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children formed.

The United Nations reckons 170 million of today’s children are workers, mostly in the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Archaeologists at the Barcelona conference say they have only scratched the surface of ancient child labourers, but expect to finding much more in future investigations.

Children were employed to strip leaves or soften animal fibre with their teeth to make string.