CULTURAL changes following the Reformation may have led breastfeeding in urban Scotland to decline far earlier than previously understood, bone analysis suggests.

Efforts are currently underway to increase the prevalence of breastfeeding in the UK, which has one of the lowest rates in the world. Only 40% of infants are breastfed at six to eight weeks of age, according to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, while Norway’s rate is 70% at six months.

It is commonly held that mothers across the UK began turning from the practice in the Victorian era.

However, archaeologists say a “sudden” reduction in the length of time women nursed their children began up to 200 years earlier. The claim is based on high-tech examination of bone samples taken from graves in Aberdeen’s St Nicholas Kirk, which come from the 12th to 18th centuries.

Dr Kate Britton of Aberdeen University said the findings reveal “a great deal” about the untold histories of women and children. She said: “A lot of history is written by men, and often the experiences of women and children were given little consideration.”

Britton went on: “There have been a number of previous efforts looking into this in different parts of England, which have produced great new insights, but none before in Scotland.

“No other study has focused on changes through time at a single site, making it difficult to ascertain whether changes are down to different geographical regions or economies.

“By analysing our data in conjunction with the results of these previous studies, we can see that trends were very similar across England and Scotland. For example, we can see that middle-class people in Aberdeen were behaving in same way as those in London workhouses a century or so later.

“We can only speculate as to why this might be but increased urbanisation, women working outside the home and cultural changes following the Reformation may be contributing factors.

“Furthermore, maternal nursing was seen by some as inconvenient and unfashionable, interfering with social pursuits. An alternative was wet-nursing, but there also seems to be a corresponding decline in the social acceptance of wet nursing in this period, with medical writers and physicians in the later medieval period and into the 16th and 17th centuries discussing the link between the personal attributes of the person feeding an infant and the baby’s character. Red-heads, for example, were to be avoided as wet-nurses as they could make a baby hot tempered with their milk.”

Bone fragments were tested for changes which determine the introduction of weaning to determine how long breastfeeding occurred for in each case, and at what age it ended.

Dr Gundula Müldner of Reading University, who lead that work, commented: “What we might now consider to be a long period of breastfeeding for infants – over two years old – was common for thousands of years but came to a rapid halt around 500 years ago.

“The growing urban environments of the period may well have contributed to the rapidity of this change across different social groups, with the social melting pot they created likely accelerated the process.”