Full Description
Critical interdisciplinary examination of archeaology's approach to childhood in prehistory.
Children existed in ancient times as active participants in the societies in which they lived and the cultures they belonged to. Despite their various roles, and in spite of the demographic composition of ancient societies where children comprised a large percentage of the population, children are almost completely missing in many current archaeological discourses. To remedy this, The Archaeology of Childhood aims to instigate interdisciplinary dialogues between archaeologists and other disciplines on the notion of childhood and children and to develop theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze the archaeological record in order to explore and understand children and their role in the formation of past cultures. Contributors consider how the notion of childhood can be expressed in artifacts and material records and examine how childhood is described in literary and historical sources of people from different regions and cultures. While we may never be able to reconstruct every last aspect of what childhood was like in the past, this volume argues that we can certainly bring children back into archaeological thinking and research, and correct many erroneous and gender-biased interpretations.
Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Children as Archaeological Enigma
Güner Coşkunsu
Part I. Theorizing (In)visibility, Legitimacy, and Biases in Archaeological Approaches to Children and Childhood
1. The Devil's Advocate or Our Worst Case Scenario: The Archaeology of Childhood Without Any Children
Jane Eva Baxter
2. Making Children Legitimate: Negotiating the Place of Children and Childhoods in Archaeological Theory
Kathryn Kamp
3. Method and Theory for an Archaeology of Age
Scott R. Hutson
4. Bodies and Encounters: Seeing Invisible Children in Archaeology
Joanna Sofaer
5. Modern Biases, Hunter-Gatherers' Children: On the Visibility of Children in Other Cultures
Nurit Bird-David Part II. Interdisciplinary and Archaeological Approaches to Studying Children and Childhood in the Past
6. Grown Up: Adult Height Dimorphism as an Archive of Living Conditions of Boys and Girls in Prehistory
Eva Rosenstock
7. Placing Children in Society: Using Ancient DNA to Identify Sex and Kinship of Child Skeletal Remains, and Implications for Gender and Social Organization
Keri A. Brown
8. Metaphors for Understanding Children and Their Role in Culture
Jack A. Meacham Part III. Case Studies in the Archaeology of Childhood
9. Children of the Ice Age
Paul G. Bahn
10. Children in the Anthropomorphic Imagery of the European and Near Eastern Neolithic
Peter F. Biehl
11. From Playthings to Sacred Objects? Household Enculturation Rituals, Figurines, and Plastering Activities at Neolithic Catalhoyuk, Turkey
Sharon K. Moses
12. The Ends and Means of Childhood: Mourning Children in Early Greece
Susan Langdon
13. The Children's Cemetery of Lugnano in Teverina, Umbria: Hierarchy, Magic, and Malaria
David Soren
14. The Age of Consent: Children and Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome
Jeannine Diddle Uzzi
15. "A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place": The Cultural Context of Late Victorian Toys
Kyle Somerville
Part IV. Commentaries
16. Theoretical Issues in Investigating Childhood
Frank Hole
17. Grubby Little Fingerprints: A Commentary on the Visibility of Childhood
Traci Ardren
Contributors
Index
