Children and their Childhoods: Retrospectives and Prospectives

Abstract

In the twenty-five years since its birth, the archaeology of children and childhoods has made considerable progress. The misconception that the child is a natural category with little cultural variability has been successfully challenged, as have the notions that children were culturally unimportant and archaeologically invisible. Archaeologists have developed a wide variety of techniques for ‘finding children’ using both embodied traces such as fingerprints and other evidence from artefacts and their distributions. Despite considerable advances, the archaeology of childhood is still not adult. Archaeologists still tend to rely over-heavily on certain artefact types. Other avenues for investigating childhood, such as the theory of affordances, need to be more extensively explored. Furthermore, children are still not as central to our theories of cultural dynamics at both the micro and macro level as they should be. Archaeologists remain to be completely convinced that the child is central to archaeological theory or that without examining this aspect of the human experience, explanations of past cultural dynamics are invariably flawed.

Keywords:

• archaeology
• archaeological methodology
• cross-cultural comparisons

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn A. Kamp

Kathryn A. Kamp, Earl D. Strong Professor of Social Studies, Anthropology Department, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA 50112, USA. Email: [email protected]