Finding Children Without Toys: The Archaeology of Children at Shabbona Grove, Illinois

Abstract

The idea that children's activities may be seen through traditionally adult material culture is rarely explored in archaeological analyses. This paper advocates a more nuanced interpretation of assemblages in archaeological datasets that highlights children and their activities. Discussions of children in the archaeological record are often restricted to material culture attributed specifically to them, such as toys and clothing. Archaeological research conducted in Shabbona Grove, rural Illinois, USA, revealed a concentration of non-child-specific artefacts, the context of which suggests the deliberate collection or curation by children in the latter part of the twentieth century. The concentration was diverse and included artefacts of ceramics, glassware, machinery metal and clothing. The Shabbona Grove study illustrates the potential of identifying children's actions without child-specific material culture. At this site, child-specific material culture recovered in excavation may be less informative about the actions and lives of children compared to other child-utilised items. The oppressive poverty at Shabbona Grove suggests an interpretation of the suspected children's collection as a form of coping mechanism or expression.

KEYWORDS:

• child-specific material culture
• archaeology of children
• collecting
• agency

Acknowledgements

This work was funded in part by the University of Chicago PRISM (Planning Resources and Involvement for Students in the Majors) Summer Research Grant 2011. I would like to thank Mr and Mrs Lintereur for their unrelenting kindness throughout the excavations, as well as the assistance of the Shabbona, Lee, Rollo Historical Museum. I would also like to thank the many contributors to SGAP, but especially Robert Croyl, Danica Farley, Ayn Woodward, Rebecca Graff, Maria Lozada, Alston Thoms, and Michael B. J. Farley. Without you, this work would have never gotten off the ground (into the ground, more accurately) and these stories would have never been told.

ORCID

Crystal Dozier http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0874-2549

Notes

1 References in the quotation have been excluded for the purposes of clarity.