On the Move: Archaeological Approaches to Children and Childhood

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

The archaeology of children and childhood has been a dynamic field of investigation since the late 1980s. Its practitioners recognize that the study of childhood is, in fact, the study of society as a whole. It is also an inherently interdisciplinary undertaking, as archaeologists are required to integrate into their analyses a diverse array of archaeological evidence - including material culture, funerary practices, human skeletal remains, built environments, and landscapes - informed - but not restricted - by the insights of a range of disciplines - including history, sociology, anthropology and ethnography. This session explores children and childhood in the context of an array of social, institutional, bodily and geographical transformations, such as migration, political change, physical growth, progression through the lifecycle, and entry into working and institutional life. It will examine the ways in which social, political and economic transformations impact on children, and how childhood experience, in turn, informs and is central to those broad processes. The session is organised into three interconnected strands which address, in turn, bioarchaeological approaches to children's identities and experiences; funerary evidence and biocultural approaches to childhood experiences; and the material culture of children's work, play and learning environments.

Other Keywords
childhood • Children • bioarchaeology • Material Culture • andes • Migration • Burial Practices • Pottery Production • Lifeways • Osteoarchaeology

Geographic Keywords
Europe • South America

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)
Documents
  • Ageing, childhood and social identity in the early Neolithic of central Europe (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Penny Bickle. Linda Fibiger.

    Identity is an embodied experience and, as such, it has the capacity to change over a lifetime as the body grows, goes through puberty, suffers illness and becomes inscribed with habitual movements from daily tasks. Understanding the process of maturation is therefore an important facet of investigating identity. In this paper, we focus on ageing and childhood in the early Neolithic of central Europe, the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture (5500–4900 cal BC), with particular reference to...

  • The Bioarchaeology of Fetuses (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sian Halcrow. Nancy Tayles. Gail Elliott.

    Until relatively recently, fetuses, along with infants and children, were largely overlooked in bioarchaeological research. Over the past 20 years there has been increasing recognition of the importance of research on immature individuals in the archaeological context. However, although fetuses are now sometimes included in analyses of population health and isotopic studies of infant weaning and diet in the past, most research focuses on postnatal individuals. This paper reviews some of the...

  • Changing with the times: An exploration of shifting attitudes and funerary treatment of children from the Roman to early medieval period in Britain (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Squires.

    Throughout Britain, archaeological cemeteries and settlements are being increasingly subjected to in-depth site analyses. Large scale excavations and subsequent post-excavation work result in large bodies of osteological and artefactual data which, in turn, allow archaeologists to glean an insight into the social identity of past populations. Biocultural studies that specifically focus on the treatment and attitudes towards children living in Romano-Britain (1st-5th century A.D.) and early...

  • Children and the ceramic industry in medieval England (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Green.

    This paper discusses the role of children in the ceramic industry in medieval England, using the work of medieval ceramics specialists Maureen Mellor and Stephen Moorhouse as a starting point from which new evidence relating to this subject can be assessed. Children’s involvement in pottery production manifests itself in a variety of ways, including fingerprints on ceramic sherds, decorative qualities on pots and tiles, and documentary references. Similar studies relating to pottery production...

  • "Children in a ragged state": Seeking a bioarchaeological narrative of childhood in Ireland during the Great Famine (1845–52) (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonny Geber.

    More than half of all victims of the Great Famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 were children, but despite this fact relatively little attention, amongst a vast body of famine research undertaken to date, has been undertaken to explore their experiences and what realities they endured during this period. Following the archaeological discovery and bioarchaeological study of a large famine-period mass burial ground adjacent to the former workhouse in Kilkenny City, the physical experience of this...

  • Children of the Revolution: the rise of rickets in urban societies in 19th-century England (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Hunt-Watts.

    In the late 18th- to early 19th-century England, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on health was experienced by both manufacturers and workers alike, as it both changed the roles played by workers and the environment of urban living. Many of these workers would have been children, often as young as 9 years old, who found employment in factories to supplement the family income. The impact of industrialisation on the nutritional health of adults has been found in evidence such as shrinking...

  • Dublin’s Bedford Asylum and the material legacy of the ‘Industrious Child’ (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Fennelly.

    This paper will determine the extent to which the concept of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ was incorporated into the design of public institutions for the reception of children in the early-nineteenth century. The primary case study of this paper will be the Bedford Asylum for Industrious Children, a purpose built institution constructed adjacent to the North Dublin Union House of Industry in Ireland. Particular attention will be given to the frequent mention of the asylum in the records of the...

  • The emotive agency of infants and children in early Anglo-Saxon inhumation cemeteries (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Duncan Sayer.

    Infant and child graves have often received ambiguous interpretation when found in archaeological context. In 2012 a child’s grave was excavated in the sixth century cemetery at Oakington Cambridgeshire. Sometime after deposition its feet were truncated by a large adult grave, however, the child’s bones were repositioned on its legs, an action which impels continuing agency influencing the gravediggers long after the child had died and been buried. Child mortality was high in many past...

  • Formation and Transformation of Identities in the Andes: The Constructions of Childhood among the Tiwanaku (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Blom. Kelly Knudson. John Janusek. Sara Becker. Corey Bowen.

    Despite their importance, little attention has been paid to childhood and the roles of children in the ancient Andes. Here, we focus our case study on the Tiwanaku polity of the South Central Andes, which expanded through migration and culture contact across parts of Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Argentina between ca. 500-1100AD. The way the lives of children are structured and shaped are fundamental to understanding the formation and maintenance of states and their impact on the life experiences of...

  • Growing up on the move: childhood experience in the Viking Age (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Hadley.

    The involvement of children in the Viking Age migrations, and their experiences upon settlement in new regions, has been afforded little attention by archaeologists. In part this derives from the perceived paucity of evidence for children and their lives. It is also arguably because migration is generally overlooked as a facet of childhood because of an assumption that ‘the home’ is the environment in which childhood is experienced and thus this is where analytical attention is often focused....

  • Making medieval toys: Using experimental archaeology to engage students in academic enquiry (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Halstad McGuire.

    The early medieval period is often thought of as a grim, violent era, characterized by conflict and social inequality. It is typically dominated by adult male narratives, albeit with a growing body of work centred on women’s lives. Children have remained in the shadows, sometimes seen but rarely heard. There is limited archaeological evidence for children’s activities and even less appears in textual sources from the Middle Ages. This paper explores the ways in which medieval children’s toys and...

  • Patterns of Mobility during the Iron Age and Roman Periods in Apulia, Italy. (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tracy Prowse.

    Archaeological and historical evidence indicates that the end of the Iron Age in southern Italy was characterized by political and social upheaval associated with a series of battles between the Roman Republic, indigenous Italian groups, Greece, and Carthage. The outcome for many local populations in southern Italy after the Samnite, Pyrrhic, and Punic wars was the subjugation of local populations, a decline in settlement size and density, and the confiscation of land by the expanding Roman...

  • Transformations in the Palaeolithic: Searching for the social and cultural role of Neanderthal children (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gail Hitchens.

    Early prehistory presents a particular challenge for investigating children, and consequently previous work has almost exclusively consisted of biological accounts of health and growth. However, as traditional views of Neanderthals are becoming increasingly overturned, it has become clear that the social and cultural role of children could be crucial in furthering our understanding of Neanderthal society, and in turn the interactions and differences with modern humans. Through investigating...

  • What if children lived here? Asking new questions of the material culture from old Anglo-Saxon settlement excavations. (2016)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sally Crawford.

    It has been incredibly difficult to identify children's material culture in the archaeological record using the standard parameters of the last century - is it miniature? does it look like a (modern) toy? was it found actually buried with an actual child? But recent developments in the theory of the archaeology of childhood, particularly in relation to children's toys, play spaces and activities, offer new ways of asking questions of objects to reconsider whether they might be child-related,...