Welcome to the Spring issue of Volume sixteen of Childhood in the Past, the journal of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP).
2022 was another productive year for SSCIP and the Committee was delighted that our application to become a Charitable Incorporated Organisation was successful. On 28 March, April Nowell from the University of Victoria, Canada, delivered an online lecture for SSCIP on the topic of ‘Growing Up in the Ice Age: Were Children Drivers of Human Cultural Evolution?’.
The 14th annual conference was organised by Daniel Justel Vicente and took place in hybrid format at the University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain, on the 8-10 November. The theme of the conference was ‘Valuing Children: Past and Present’ and the session topics comprised – Valuing Children in Spain, Valuing Children in Prehistory, Valuing Children of Northern Europe, Valuing Children in the Ancient Near East, Valuing Children through their Bones, Valuing Children in Antiquity and Late Antiquity, Valuing Children in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period and Valuing Ancient Children in Recent Times and Today. The bumper programme included 37 papers from researchers based in Spain, Australia, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA and was a truly international experience. A highly engaging keynote presentation was delivered by long-standing SSCIP committee member Margarita Sánchez Romero of the University of Granada, Spain, on the topic of ‘A Little History of the Archaeology of Childhood in Spain: Valuing Children’. The venue of the conference was splendid and delegates all enjoyed the broader historical environment of Alcalá de Henares which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1998 and was the world’s first planned university city. Delegates very much enjoyed having the conference based in the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso, an iconic building dating back to the 16th century. They were also treated to a historical tour of Alcalá de Henares and a visit to the Roman city of Complutum. We are extremely grateful to Daniel Justel Vicente for organising such a fantastic conference.
We are delighted to report that the 15th annual SSCIP conference will take place on the 18-20 October 2023 and is being organised by Rocío García-Mancuso of CONICET - UNLP, Argentina. The venue for the conference is the ‘Sergio Karakachoff’ Graduate Centre of the National University of La Plata. The conference theme is ‘Voices of Time: Concepts and Perspectives that Recover Children of the Past’. SSCIP committee members have also organised sessions at the 29th European Association of Archaeologists’ annual conference, which is taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 30 August to 2 September 2023. The session, ‘New Perspectives on Childhood Archaeology Past, Present and Future: Papers in Honour of Grete Lillehammer’, has been organised by Traci Ardren (Committee member) and Carenza Lewis (Vice-President) in recognition of the major contribution that Grete Lillehammer (another SSCIP Vice-President) has made to the field of childhood in the past. ‘Through Infancy and Beyond: Bioarchaeological Perspectives of Childhood in the Past’ is being led by Claire Hodson (Secretary) and colleagues and is one of the largest sessions of the conference, attesting to the huge level of interest in the study of the remains of children within bioarchaeology.
The next volume in the SSCIP monograph series – Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices (edited by Eileen Murphy and Mélie Le Roy) – will be published this year and will be the 10th in the series. We are always happy to receive proposals for future monographs and these should be submitted to Lynne McKerr, General Editor of the monograph series, following the guidelines provided on the SSCIP website.
Volume 16 of our journal begins with an invited piece by April Nowell entitled ‘Palaeolithic Children Come of Age’. In this thought-provoking paper, April discusses the ubiquity of children on Palaeolithic sites but also the unique challenges faced by researchers when trying to access these children, including differential preservation, the use of children as holotypes, interpretive bias, the models used to determine growth and development, the definition of ‘child’ in the Palaeolithic and the impact of using both ethological and ethnographic analytical frameworks. She also looks to the positive, however, highlighting the wealth of new research being undertaken on Palaeolithic children and how this has captured the imagination in modern popular culture.
This is followed by two research papers and a review paper. In the first research paper, Michele M. Bleuze, Sandra M. Wheeler and Lana J. Williams focus on skeletal growth status in a physically abused child (Burial 519) from the Kellis 2 cemetery in Egypt. The case study investigates the size of cranial and post-cranial elements in the child who was dentally aged at 2.0-2.5 years but had clear evidence of stunted growth. They explored the extent of growth deficits in different areas of the skeleton to determine their sensitivity in the face of environmental stressors and adversity.
The second paper is by Edna Barromi-Perlman and Ruth Kark and it analyses photographs contained in historical archives that depict Bedouin children in Palestine and date from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. The photographs were taken by European photographers touring the Holy Land who aimed to depict these children in their natural environment. The study investigates how colonial photography in the region impacted upon the presentation of Bedouin children and their childhood of the time. The place of Bedouin women in society and how they are presented in the images is also examined. The paper ends with a comparative perspective and explores the practice of Western children dressing up as individuals from the Middle East for studio portraiture as part of an orientalist cliché.
In their review paper, Kirsty Squires, Esme Hookway and Nicholas Márquez-Grant assess the consequences of natural disasters and epidemics on childhood health and mortality in the past. They do this using osteoarchaeological and historical data and present evidence from a range of time periods up until the present day. They focus on three case studies – 17th-century famine in north-west England, The Spanish Civil War (AD 1936-1939) and the Plague in 17th-century Derbyshire, England – since population data from before, during, and after each of these events was available for comparison. They found that the data from the past has much resonance with the impact of such disasters on modern day children.
Our Books Review Editor, Siân Halcrow, has compiled reviews for two books for us – Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood, By Brenna Hassett and Dying Young: A Bioarchaeological Analysis of Child Health in Roman Britain, By Anna Rohnbogner. Enjoy!