The Archaeology of Childhood

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma

Güner Coşkunsu

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438458045, 9781438458052
• eBook ISBN: 9781438458069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART I

Theorizing (In)visibility, Legitimacy, and Biases in Archaeological Approaches to Children and Childhood

CHAPTER ONE

The Devil’s Advocate or Our Worst Case Scenario

The Archaeology of Childhood without Any Children

Jane Eva Baxter

Abstract The question of the archaeological (in)visibility of children is very much tied to the ways we as scholars choose to situate our understanding of children and childhood in our research. Scholarship on the archaeology of children and childhood has made some of its greatest inroads into archaeological conversations through the broader conduits of gender and identity. Engaging with these broader themes and interests has shaped much of the current research on children and the archaeological record. Research on particular cultural constructions of children and childhood and the resulting material expressions of these identities is a marked departure from some of the earliest work on children and the archaeological record, which emphasized the archaeological visibility of children through material markers of physiological and cognitive development. The purpose of this chapter is not to offer yet another discussion around nature versus nurture, nor is it to rehash critiques of Western perspectives of a universal, biological childhood; rather, it is to explore the varying ways we as archaeologists may move fluidly between multiple understandings of children and childhood to increase the likelihood of their archaeological visibility. The case study of seventeenth century New England will be used to enrich this discussion, as this period is well documented and researched as a period where children and childhood “did not exist” as cultural categories of identity.

THE ENDURING QUESTION OF THE (IN)VISIBILITY OF CHILDREN

Developing a conference on the theme of the archaeological (in)visibility of children provides us with an opportunity to confront an enduring and evolving question in archaeological theory and method. The issue of the visibility, recoverability, and viability of children as subjects in archaeological research is essentially independent of questions relating to the value of children and childhood as topics of archaeological inquiry. These two concerns of visibility and value have been inextricably intertwined in the literature on the archaeology of childhood, as archaeologists interested in studying children have used these two strains of argument to convince the broader scholarly community of the merits and possibilities of studying children archaeologically (Baxter 2008). The need to constantly sell the idea of childhood studies as an integral part of archaeological inquiry rather than an interesting curiosity or specialization has been a frustration for those who have seen the potential and results that come from using children as a lens to view the past (Baxter 2006).

Here, I’d like to suggest that the (perceived) need to consistently defend the study of children has affected how we have theorized their visibility in the archaeological record, and to challenge us to move beyond this particular rhetoric to consider multiple ways of rendering children visible in the archaeological record, particularly in non-mortuary contexts. I’d like to make a few suggestions about how we can work to disentangle the ideas of value and visibility so that archaeology that is inclusive of children may be situated in ways that are potent and poignant for the discipline as a whole. These suggestions include: (1) making children and childhood a regular consideration when we conduct archaeological research, although accepting that such a line of questioning might not always bear fruit; (2) considering childhood as one of many possible categorizations of person, and looking for ways that categories of age intersect with other categories of identity; and (3) exploring alternative strategies for analyzing archaeological evidence to address identity; particularly, stepping outside traditional modes of analysis that focus on large categories of materials and instead engaging individual objects or constellations of objects that may transcend such categories, but are particularly salient for discussions of identity and personhood in the past.

THE CONFLATION OF VALUE AND VISIBILITY: A BRIEF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

It was not long ago that archaeologists held no concern for the value of children in the past, and archaeological research was undertaken with the unquestioned assumption that children were fundamentally unimportant to archaeological interpretation. Children only appeared in archaeological literature as convenient explanations for artifacts or depositional patterns that otherwise would have been left unexplained (Baxter 2005). Evoking children as actors in the past was a simple answer, not a topic that begged to be questioned.

Despite this disregard for the value of children, the idea of the archaeological visibility of children was not a topic of disinterest. Ethnoarchaeological and experimental studies from the 1970s and early 1980s were used as grounds to define children as archaeologically invisible (Baxter 2000, 2005). These studies observed children’s behavior and noted that children moved objects from their places of discard or storage, thereby distorting the archaeological record created by adults. They also noted that children used artifacts for purposes for which they were not intended, or used natural objects as playthings that would not be identified archaeologically as artifacts. This type of attitude toward the invisibility of children can be summed up by a faculty member who explained that my dissertation project would not work because (and I paraphrase), “You know how kids are—you give them a toy and they take the toy out of the box. They just leave the toy sitting there and go play with the box. You’ll spend your whole time looking at the toy, when you should have been looking at the box. Children are different and you’ll never see that difference in the materials you have.” These constructions of archaeologically invisible children were certainly a product of a value system that determined whose actions and ideas held value in archaeological interpretations, as well as the functionalist understandings of artifacts popularized by processualist ways of thinking about material culture. This widespread assumption regarding the invisibility of children also set the stage for the earliest literature on the archaeology of childhood.

When scholarly interest in children and childhood emerged in archaeology, authors had to combat not only assumptions that devalued children but also the perception that they were archaeologically invisible (Baker 1997; Lillehammer 1989; Sofaer Derevenski 1994a). Grete Lillehammer’s seminal article that discusses “The Child’s World” (1989) is a testament to the archaeological visibility of children, enumerating the many different areas where children were visible in the material record as a way of demonstrating their value as a topic of study. Many scholars went on to develop a theoretical space for children in archaeological inquiry by invoking the lessons learned from the introduction of gender and women’s studies into archaeology (Sanchez-Romero 2009) and critiquing the cultural biases that led to a systematic devaluation and disregard of children by contemporary, Western archaeologists (Ardren 2006; Baker 1997; Baxter 2005; Joyce 2000; Kamp 2001a; Rothschild 2002; Sofaer Derevenski 1994b, 1997, 2000). Others provided evidence that children comprised significant demographic portions of all documented social groups, making any interpretation of the past without them incomplete (Ardren 2006; Baxter 2005; Chamberlain 2000). And still others presented ethnographic and historical evidence that children are significant social and economic actors in their own right, and that the organizations of families, communities, and societies often prioritize the care and training of children (Ardren 2006; Baxter 2005, 2006 a; Kamp 2001a; Sofaer Derevenski 1997, 2000a).

These areas of scholarship used thoughtful critiques to adeptly point out that systems of underlying values around children informed “evidence-based” claims of their invisibility. These writings also shared a common tone of advocacy for the archaeological study of children, and authors created compelling cases to defend and promote the archaeology of childhood. It has been through this very process of establishing a niche for and raising the profile of childhood in the broader discipline that the issues of value and visibility have become constant companions in our writing. Just as past assumptions that devalued children informed ideas of children’s archaeological invisibility, this perhaps necessary rhetoric around linking and visibility has in turn shaped the way archaeologists have approached the study of children in the archaeological record.

THE VISIBILITY OF CHILDHOOD AT A TIME OF DISCIPLINARY ADVOCACY

Archaeological scholarship of children has illustrated their visibility using archaeological data as well as historical, ethnographic, and theoretical approaches. It has been noted that children are identifiable in all of the “traditional” categories of evidence archaeologists encounter regularly in their work (Lillehammer 1989; Wilkie 2000), and this revelation has been backed up with numerous studies designed specifically to illustrate the visibility of children in a variety of archaeological contexts. To summarize these efforts, I took note of the primary analytical foci of the works I reviewed for the recent (Baxter 2008) Annual Review of Anthropology article on the archaeology of childhood. Clearly, this effort was somewhat subjective as many studies engage multiple lines of evidence, and I had to select the type of material evidence identified by the author(s) as the focal point of their work. This work is also biased in that it was confined to works specifically on the archaeology of children and childhood that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. No dissertations or masters’ theses were used, and these monograph-length sources represent an important new generation of scholarship on childhood. I also did not use studies that address children within broader analyses, although these studies are still relatively quite rare, but represent a significant evolution in scholarship.

A total of 51 articles and papers were identified in the literature as studies using archaeological evidence for the primary purpose of studying children and childhood. The categories of evidence may be broken down thusly: 18 mortuary studies, 11 ethnoarchaeological studies and/or ethnographic and historical studies with a particular application to an archaeological case, 5 studies of iconography, 14 studies of archaeological materials such as lithics and ceramics, and 3 studies of space and place. It is heartening to recognize the abundance of scholarship that has been produced on the archaeology of childhood beyond review articles, and theoretical studies and these evidentiary studies have created collectively a definitive empirical basis for the study of children in archaeology generally. These studies not only demonstrate the archaeological visibility of children, but also have resulted in significant interpretations that extend beyond children themselves and have been used to highlight the value of childhood as a way to shed light on central issues of archaeological inquiry.

I also attempted to categorize these 51 articles and papers into two primary analytical modes: those that emphasized cultural constructions of identity and those which emphasized the physiological, cognitive, and ontological development of young people. This exercise, I will freely admit, was even more subjective than the first. No evidence-based study focuses solely on cultural construction(s) of identity any more than such a study only engages physiological and cognitive development. Generally, however, most studies prioritize the theorizing and development of constructs of identity or the use of physiological and/or cognitive bases as a means of explaining the archaeological signatures of children.

Twenty-one of the 51 studies employed physiological and cognitive development as the primary way of addressing the visibility of children in the archaeological record. Such studies emphasized the opportunities and limitations afforded by the particular ontological development of children. Eight of these studies were ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies of hunter-gather children, two of which tended to be geared toward broader understandings of physiology/cognition, work and identity (Bugarin 2006), and six from a particular genre of ethnoarchaeological work on hunter-gatherer children that has a distinct evolutionary focus (Lamb and Hewlett 2005; Bird and Bird 2000). An example of these latter studies is an ethnoarchaeological study of children of the Meriam, Eastern Torres, which has shown that children’s foraging behaviors included a series of age-based practices based on physiological development (stride, hand and arm size, etc.) that were archaeologically visible in the composition of shell middens (Bird and Bird 2000). This study pointed to the archaeological visibility of children, but emphasized the physical characteristics of a developing body that resulted in particular behaviors and prey choices that differed from fully grown adults.

Another area of work on children that emphasized physiological and cognitive development is archaeological research on children’s involvement in craft production activities, including stone tool production, ceramic manufacture, and weaving (Bagwell 2002; Crown 1999, 2001, 2002; Finlay 1997; Greenfield 2000; Grimm 2000; Kamp et al. 1999; Kamp 2001b; Shea 2006; Smith 2006). These studies focused on the particular contributions of children to communities of crafters (Lave and Wenger 1991; Shea 2006) through the archaeological signatures of individuals who were still learning to be competent crafters in their own right as they passed through various stages of physiological and cognitive development.

The other 30 works used in this review placed identity at the forefront of archaeological analyses as well as interpretations. How children were defined, performed certain roles, and held particular places of importance or unimportance in a particular case provided the primary analytic for these works. All of the studies of iconography fell into this rubric, and such studies have been used successfully to identify emic constructions of childhood identity through images of individuals found in literary, artistic, and iconographic sources (e.g., Beaumont 2000; Cohen and Rutter 2007; Hays-Gilpin 2002; Joyce 2000; King 2006). Sixteen of the mortuary studies ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Children as Archaeological Enigma
• Part I Theorizing (In)visibility, Legitimacy, and Biases in Archaeological Approaches to Children and Childhood
• Part II Interdisciplinary and Archaeological Approaches to Studying Children and Childhood in the Past
• Part III Case Studies in the Archaeology of Childhood
• Part IV Commentaries
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover