A History of the Theories and Methods of Childhood Archaeology

          The child and childhood were left out of archaeological research until after the development of feminist theory within the discipline. Grete Lillehammer’s 1989 article served as a catalyst to begin focusing on archaeological sites with the child at the center. For the first time, a child’s agency is acknowledged, and they are framed to be dependent on adults while still having an impactful effect on their society. Lillehammer proposed three levels of cultural transfusion involving children. The first is how they interact with their environment. The next is how they communicate with other children through actions such as playing. The last level is how adults pass down culture through their children. In the decades since, childhood social archaeologists and bioarchaeologists use both social and biological age when handling juvenile remains because the developmental stage of an individual does not always coincide with a culture’s definition of a child. Several postprocessual case studies indicate childhood experiences, such as political and economic status, malnutrition, mortality and morbidity, and burial rituals, to be important in the conquest for a complete understanding of a cultural group, especially considering children are not the invisible phantoms in a society that they were assumed to be.

          Archaeologists cannot with absolute certainty define what a child is in simple words because this definition is reliant upon the culture and period in which the individual in question is classified. Medical doctors in the twenty-first century agree that childhood is the period of growth and development one undergoes to transition to adulthood. It is characterized by unfused epiphyses, smaller proportions, developing organs and brains, and the arrival then departure of deciduous teeth (Lillehammer 1989:90). While this definition includes an age range from infancy to puberty, Strouse et al. recognize that pediatricians will often see their patients until ages 18 or 21, depending on the region (2022:2241). This is not due to biological age but rather sociocultural age, where societal structure impacts what age a person is no longer considered a child, although it is an example of skeletal and anatomical indicators influencing social constructs. The United States Department of Justice refers to a juvenile as a person under the age of 18, which impacts certain rights that are not available until this legal classification of an adult is obtained. Therefore, a person in the U.S. currently can have biologically passed the period of adolescence but still be restricted from all the privileges an adult receives. It is important to note the differences between the terms ‘child’ and ‘childhood,’ particularly as they relate to scientific study. ‘Children’ is a word used to describe the biological age of an individual, while childhood refers to the social aspect of the individual’s life, thus equating ‘child’ to the natural sciences and ‘childhood’ to the social sciences. The qualifications of childhood are dynamic within cultures; therefore, there is no single definition that will encompass all children across space and time.

            Even now, with the discipline growing more inclusive of childhood presence in the archaeological record, there are several limitations in the study of childhood. First, it consists of adult scholars speculating on a child’s ontology, which they are only familiar with personally through memory. While this may contribute to inconsistencies or weak assumptions, archaeologists have experiences with other cultures and ideally take precautions to base their theories on credible evidence. Next is the unfortunate reality that there is a lack of reliable sex estimation techniques in juvenile skeletons that greatly hinder important information a site could reveal. A medieval, subadult gravesite containing a sword radically changes in meaning if the individual is found to be female instead of male, as the weapon indicates. However, there is not yet a method that can confirm osteological sex at this time. Another issue that has been addressed but not necessarily fixed is the implication of using terms like ‘subadult’ and ‘nonadult’ when referring to juveniles (Halcrow and Tayles 2008:193). These terms properly represent the perspective that began with Aristotle in the B.C. period that children are inferior to adults and compare them to their relationship with adults rather than as their own beings. Archaeologists have made large contributions in researching children separate from adults, and these terms are leftover reminders of the lack of existence of the discipline and its novelty. Lastly, because the social constructs of childhood have changed through time and depend on the specific culture, archaeologists have been guilty of placing their own biases on what childhood is and applying it to a site that does not meet the definition of a child socially. This can occur even unintentionally, where a gravesite of a 12-year-old individual is assumed to be buried with childhood-associated artifacts but surpasses the age of adulthood in their particular culture at the time of life.

          While childhood in archaeological contexts lacked a comprehensive study until the last 40 years, other disciplines have discussed the concept of a child, specifically philosophy and social history. It is an Aristotelian perspective that children are simply immature adults who cannot meet the full status of human until they reach adulthood, which was carried over centuries until it was finally challenged in the late 1980s by the Postprocessual entrance. The Greek philosopher supposed that children do not have the agency to make choices that meaningfully affect the world around them because they have not yet undergone the training (Tress 1995:3). Aristotle’s study of the child included play, education, and apprenticeship, but did not delve into the idea of childhood as a concept. Philippe Ariés, a prominent social historian on childhood of the 1960s, supports many of Aristotle’s views on children of the past, specifically that children were “miniature adults” until after the Middle Ages. In fact, Ariés claims that childhood did not exist at all until the 1400s-1600s when Europeans were able to have the post-Medieval luxury of focusing on education and keeping their children secure and happy. He argues that during the Middle Ages and before, there was no childhood, especially after age seven, due to the economic structure of the period (Ariés, 1962). While numerous characteristics contributed to a very different childhood than we envision today, such as high mortality rates, shorter lifespans, and labor expectations for children, it is constricting to assume a different childhood definition for the European Middle Ages equates to no childhood. This line of thinking was retained by scholars of numerous disciplines and led archaeologists to believe that children were lesser versions of adults who would not reveal anything they could not get from adults.

          Another influential thinker named Lloyd deMause published a separate perspective of childhood throughout the ages a decade later that was meant to contradict Ariés’ removal of childhood until after the 1400s. As an American psychoanalyst and social historian, he did this by claiming the timeline of childhood’s history began with a consistent occurrence of infanticide (Lillehammer 1989:92-93). This would have ranged from the beginning of the Homo sapiens existence and lasted until around 500 A.D., after which it phased out in favor of abandonment and ambivalence by the parents before slowly becoming a positive socialization and helping of the children that represent childhood in the modern period. While deMause accounts for some form of childhood before this positive shift, he then implies that it was not until then that a “real” childhood began. There are several issues with his child-rearing model, most notably, that childhood cannot be measured as a constant change as this model suggests, and especially cannot be representative of all cultures. In actuality, the start of childhood at this shift coincides with the end of the Middle Ages, making his argument against Ariés appear more supportive than critical. Both men also failed to consider any cultures other than the ones in Medieval Europe. Nevertheless, these frameworks provide a comprehensive understanding of how the literature surrounding children and childhood was tailored by modern biases of what the definition of child is and is not.

          The two most prominent processual archaeologists, Lewis Binford and Ian Hodder, excluded children from their theoretical analyses, as was typical for the field of archaeology since its conception. The focus during New Archaeology was less on interpreting material objects than it was on collecting artifacts to be displayed at museums. Children were only included in an archaeological explanation when no other explanation could be given or for the sake of convenience. There was no further interpretation of how a child’s material culture helped them interact with their environment because children were unassuming and unimportant to archaeological research. Each of these approaches mentioned above, including Ariés’ and deMause’s approaches that align most closely with culture history, are dismissive of the actual roles of the child throughout history. Children are unlike adults in many ways, one of them being a lack of competence concerning a skillful impact in social, economic, and political roles (Crawford et al. 2018:23). This is not to say they do not have an effect, but since archaeologists neglected to consider children as players in their world, it was easy to assume that a lack of competency translated to a lack of agency. Therefore, individuals with no agency are not relevant to archaeological study, especially when it was widely accepted to simply look at the ones that had competency and consequently, agency. They treat children as objects that things happen to rather than as subjects that cause things to happen (Lillehammer 1989). Variations in cultural practices were either ignored by the processualists, misconstrued, or made to conform with European standards. This happens on as large of a scale as misidentifying a cultural adult as a child because of how the archaeologist’s culture defines childhood and adulthood.

          There are numerous reasons children have been overlooked in the archaeological record aside from the presumed lack of agency. Infant and early adolescent skeletal material is smaller and thinner than adult bones, with about 300 fragments compared to the 206 adult portions. An archaeologist untrained at identifying juvenile remains may mistake them for animal bones or accidentally overlook them entirely. Since it was acceptable to perceive children as unimportant and irreverent, it was not common practice to undergo the extra education it took to excavate and study their bones. This made them easier to ignore. Archaeology, consistently being a male-dominated field up until the feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s, contributed to the ignorance of children in the record as well. Children were considered an extension of their mothers, who were also often disregarded in favor of men. It was not until women joined the field that children started being considered as their own entities, and this discipline remains most heavily researched by women. Even still, Lillehammer laments how many archaeologists limit a child’s relationship with adults solely to their mother, as that is an incomplete record of a child’s cultural interactions.

          A shift occurred in archaeology with Grete Lillehammer’s 1989 publication of “A Child is Born. The Child's World in an Archaeological Perspective”, a call to action to frame children as subjects with autonomy and the ability to transfuse culture by engaging with their surrounding environments, other children, and the adults that are passing down culture onto them. Lillehammer created a model she named “The Child’s World” that examines agency in children. She was one of the first to acknowledge that children had the ability to make their own decisions about their actions independently. They have the capacity to influence their own thoughts and have a voice in society, although this is dependent on the age of the juvenile, as this does not apply to a newborn who cannot speak. Lillehammer notes the important roles children play in continuing culture and participating in the creation of new aspects of culture. These roles may be assigned based on age, sex, sibling order, status, economic position, and numerous other factors (1989:93). A common counter to the stance that children are unrecognizable in social and economic structures is the confirmed presence of child labor throughout time and space. In a later piece, Lillehammer combats that children have been doing some form of labor alongside adults, meaning archaeologists must not assume that material evidence is the exclusive result of adult activity (Lillehammer 2018:71). Lillehammer is credited with kickstarting the emergence of childhood archaeology as a full-fledged discipline.

          Kathryn Kamp’s “Where Have All the Children Gone?” is largely inspired by the work of Lillehammer, as she was one of the first to respond to the original call to action. The transfer of culture from adults to children is part of the process within the training period, where children learn the necessary skills to become adults, as well as belief systems, attitudes, values, and personality development. She supports Lillehammer’s claim of children assisting in the labor practices expected of that culture throughout the past. This includes but is not limited to water collection, household work, and, in some instances across time and space, factory workers and agricultural laborers. Kamp maintains that children were involved in the economic structure, and archaeologists must apply this framework in the archaeological record.

            Halcrow and Tayles (2008) bring a unique assessment pertaining to childhood archaeology, specifically the clash of bioarchaeologists and social archaeologists and their hesitancy to combine methodologies for a holistic approach. Social archeologists criticize bioarchaeologists for excluding a social age in their interpretations, causing them to rely on the biological age that excludes many cultural implications of the site. They believe that skeletal analysis gives plenty of information about how the children died but not much about how they lived and did so within their culture. Social archaeologists do not take into account how bioarchaeologists can provide insight into the health of individuals, which no doubt played a role in their lives. Looking at multiple individuals in a population may also inform archaeologists on community health and the environment. Halcrow and Tayles employ the term “Social Child” to examine the social framework within the archaeological record. They agree that while biological age is universal, the social roles of individual cultures. The health of children directly corresponds to their relationships with adults, attributing to the widespread rumor that mothers in societies with high mortality and morbidity rates refrain from maternal affection with their infants until after they surpass the age at which many die. They introduce a curious possibility that infants are gifted with the agency to inspire nurturing behaviors from adults to ensure survivability, such as eye contact and nuzzling while breastfeeding. This is a contradiction to my earlier statement that agency is age-dependent, and I am not convinced that newborns are socially aware enough to purposefully engage their parents as a survival instinct. Nonetheless, this does not negate the fact that infants and young juveniles play a role in their societies, even if that consists of care rather than economic benefit.

            Another prominent figure who has published a book as recently as 2022 on childhood archaeology is Jane Eva Baxter, a professor at DePaul University. Baxter seeks to improve upon the interpretations of childhood livelihood through theoretical and methodological advancements. Pertaining to the material culture associated with children and the inconsistent habit of previous archaeologists to assign objects to children because it was the easiest path to take, Baxter examines the process behind this phenomenon and what negative implications it has for the archaeological analysis of the entire society in question. First, relegating an object to that of a child because it is a figurine, miniature, or a possible toy of some sort is acceptable if there is conclusive evidence that points to it being so.  For example, Figure 1.2 of Crawford et al.’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood portrays a ceramic jug in which a child’s fingerprint is imprinted on the handle (2018:22). Archaeologists interpret this as a child being involved in the creation process of the pottery. However, if the artifact does not indicate whether it was a decoration piece for adults or a toy for juveniles, it is only an assumption that it is a child’s object. This also implies that adults cannot use children’s objects and children cannot use adults’ objects, which is problematic and further contributes to the idea that children are unable to interact with adults in the adult world. Lastly, children and adults may use the same material object differently, but the child’s employment of the object may be overshadowed, ignored, or completely missed in favor of the conventional manner.

          Because the archaeology of childhood was birthed from feminist theory, it is important to have an understanding of the ways in which it influenced archaeologists to turn a lens on children of the past. Historically, women and children have been grouped together and defined as minority groups. Plato included in his writings that women were put into the same category as children and slaves, while his student Aristotle compared the appearances of women with those of children. Baxter (2008) suggests that children have been excluded from the narrative because of the parallels to women, supported by these philosophical writers from ancient Greece, which is exactly what spurred them to begin a more inclusive study that considers children separately. Halcrow and Tayles include an evaluation of feminist theory and how it led to the emergence of the discipline, although they note that the focus was mainly on women and still excluded children from the research subject. They also make interesting connections to the “othering” that occurs with the use of “nonadult” and “subadult” to describe children, likening it to the manner in which females were considered inferior to males. While I agree that the feminist movement was long overdue, the first waves were more concerned with generalizing gender roles across all populations throughout time and space. I argue that they were so consumed with the offense of comparing women to children and slaves that they failed to address the diminishment of the children themselves. Archaeologists left children behind when they began to advance in feminism, Marxism, and queer theory.

          It is one thing to discuss the theoretical components of including children in an investigation into an archaeological site, but it is another thing to achieve a proper analysis in practice. Ideally, every civilization unearthed by archaeologists needs to be evaluated for childhood presence and their roles within the cultural structure. These include evidence of child’s play, effects of political, social, and economic status, weaning and malnutrition, and burial and funerary contexts. From this, scholars can obtain information on how these factors played vital roles in shaping a child’s life, just as the child does so for their societal framework. Therefore, I will summarize case studies of each of the mentioned elements to see how knowledge of these improved archaeologists’ understanding of the involved societies.

          I will begin by discussing Newman and Gowland’s Dedicated Followers of Fashion? Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Socio-Economic Status, Inequality, and Health in Urban Children from the Industrial Revolution, England case study that explores the relationship between cultural practices of specific economic statuses and infant feeding effects (2016). A sample size of 403 juveniles was used in this study. Variables such as femora cortical thickness, vertebral neural canal size, pathology presence, tibia growth, and dental age were all useful in age estimation and in analyzing the implications of breastfeeding practices. (Newman and Gowland 2016:218-219). The pathologies in question are rickets, scurvy, periosteal new bone formation, and dental enamel hypoplasia, all indicators of malnutrition from a lack of specific vitamins. These Industrial Revolution-aged subadults in London were compared to a relatively modern data set of individuals not experiencing these health issues from 1955. Four cemeteries were excavated, with the Cross Bones cemetery housing the children of the poor, the St. Benet Sherehog and Bow Baptist cemeteries assigned to the middle class, and Chelsea Old Church lodging higher class children. It may be hypothesized that the higher the class, the less affected the children would be by nutritional deficiencies, while the lower class individuals would be more affected since their mothers were unable to afford proper nutrition for themselves to produce nutritional breastmilk. On the contrary, higher-class infants and young juveniles did experience high levels of malnutrition, similar to the lower-class infants, but it is not due to working long hours and a lack of food, like with those at the Cross Bones cemetery. Instead, upper-class children reaped the consequences of cultural practice. It was not fashionable for wealthy women to breastfeed; therefore, the infants were fed by either a wet nurse, often a mixture of flour and water, or cow’s milk. These alternative feeding methods to breastmilk did not provide the infant with the proper nutrients and caused them to have weak immune systems. If they survived weaning, it was not stylish to spend time in the sun, which decreased the iron and vitamin D in their systems and contributed to rickets and even lower immune systems. In conclusion, the wealthy children experienced deficiency and disease due to cultural customs, while the poorer children experienced them due to a lack of food caused by poverty. Systematic malnutrition and stunted growth of the mother were passed down to the child in many cases as well, causing a cycle. This case study is a prime example of how bioarchaeology and social archaeology must work hand-in-hand to paint a complete picture of the archaeological site.

          The next case study I will use as an example of practical postprocessualism is an evaluation of what age was considered adulthood for slaves on a Peruvian sugar plantation in use from 1748–1817 (Maas 2023). Hacienda La Quebrada in Cañete, Peru is a cemetery containing the remains of 158 enslaved children, who made up approximately half of the entire cemetery sample. Maass seeks to research the physiological stresses that accompany harsh manual labor, how they manifest, and at what age they begin to track the level of labor at each age group. Juveniles under three years old were found to experience the highest mortality rates of the population, meaning most of the infants born to the slaves at this plantation did not survive the conditions during and after birth. After estimating the ages of the rest of the children, cranial porotic hyperostosis and enamel hypoplasia were used to indicate malnutrition during early childhood, lesions on the bones suggested infection and trauma analysis was to pinpoint at what age the trauma was the worst to indicate the more frequent labor of adult slaves. Results show that once the children reached puberty, they were given an adult load of work, and thus, the radically different form of childhood to all others aforementioned ended. Culturally, once the individual was able to be less reliant on the adults around them, mortality levels decreased even as physiological stress increased. Maass also provides insight into the relationship between children and adults, specifically how mothers could not be as attentive to their children because of the conditions they were forced to live under. The author depicts how social age may be different between the slaves and slaveowners as well, who do not wait for the enslaved children to reach the same age as their own children to acquire their services earlier.

            One cannot claim to examine the archaeology of childhood without studying the importance of play in the child’s life. Eiselt defines play as “a pervasive feature of juvenile activity” in which the child is a “principal actor and consumer of material culture” (Eiselt 2018:349). Playing is crucial to how a child interacts with the external world and forges their identity that remains present throughout their time as an adult, mainly because of its role in cognitive development. Baxter (2005, 2008) supplements this perspective with an example of Incan children playing with small vessels created entirely and exclusively for play. To a modern American, a child playing with toys is a common practice that hardly garners a second thought. To the Inca, play was believed to be a gift transferred from the gods onto people. Thus, playing was a ritual used for otherworldly communication. It must be considered that play does not inspire the same reactions among all populations or even within populations across time and space. There is a difference between the Incan child communicating with gods and an American child playing with dolls with fellow children, although both are stimulating their minds while participating in culture.

           A specific case study of Victorian Era toys produced for the ages between seven and 12 was conducted by Kyle Somerville in 2015 and observes how toy production reveals information about both children and the adults who made and purchased them for their children. To begin, the clothing provided to young juveniles was homogenous to males and females. Thus, toys were how society introduced gender roles to children so that they would instill proper placement in society (Somerville 2015:278-279). Toys were also chosen by parents to protect the children from being exposed to “evil and vice” because children were believed to be heavily susceptible to the immoralities around them. These observations reveal more about the adults in Victorian society than they do about the wants and delights of the children, as the mass production of toys was marketed to the parents, specifically mothers who were responsible for child rearing, with the promise of encouraging good behavior. Toys also connected the child’s world to the adult’s world, as well as children to other children, and were characterizations of economic status. Somerville explains that clockwork toys were pricier and only accessible to middle and upper-class children, although all toys for male children, no matter their status, were geared toward encouraging the boy to make a lot of money when he grows up. Female toys encouraged skills associated with the home and taught girls how to behave morally. Another example of play reflecting adult culture rather than the child’s world is the presence of nationalism and racism in the toys. These were intended to teach children to be proud of where they come from, as well as to think of themselves as superior to other races. Stereotyped toys of African Americans portray animalistic behavior, and of Chinese men gambling assisted in outspreading racist ideals into even the innocent actions of playing.

          Children were undoubtedly the recipients of funerary rituals and burial contexts, as evidenced by the hundreds of literature on cemeteries that include children. One particular cemetery near Lugnano in Teverina, Italy was discovered in 1998 by Soren and Soren (David Soren 2015:235). The focus of this case study is on a rural infant cemetery containing 47 infants and 13 juvenile dogs from the later Roman Empire. The material culture found in the rooms of the cemetery consisted of potsherds buried both shallowly and deeply, dating back to the 5^th century. The placement of these infants was abnormal in that internments were often overlapping or above other burials, with seven infants buried at once on one occasion. The burial method was inconsistent as well, with six different types of burials discovered, each utilizing roof tile or transport jars to house the remains. While none were inherently wealthy, the oldest individuals, an age range of about six months to three years, although only one individual was older than six months, were afforded more care in their burials. The youngest, on average, did not experience much care and were scattered about the ruins of the villa, other than a select few who had more elaborate burials. The presence of pottery and other material culture suggests a ritual component to this cemetery, with Soren making note of the common ontology where magic and ghosts caused large numbers of deaths at once. It is not unexpected that this be the case where 47 juveniles were buried in a short amount of time. The presence of young puppies is ritualistic in itself, with them being slaughtered, dismembered, and then offered as animal sacrifices to ward off evil and promote peace. This case study is relevant to the analysis of cultural transfusion as it relates to religion because although Christianity had spread to much of the Roman Empire by the 5^th century, rural communities were slow to receive outside influence due to isolation from bigger cities.

          While the discipline continues to grow thanks to the Lillehammer catalyst in 1989, there is still much to be developed in regards to theory and method application that keep children as the subject of the study. In Lillehammer’s follow-up article, meant to provide an update in the wake of archaeologists’ responses, she acknowledges issues that were not mentioned in 1989, as well as ones that did not exist then but have revealed themselves now that childhood archaeology is an independent venture from general archaeology. As mentioned earlier by both Lillehammer and Kamp, childhood is the learning process through which children gain the necessary skills for adulthood. Lillehammer challenges archaeologists to trace this learning process throughout the record. She asks us to examine where the theory needs to be strengthened, and even terminology and language. It is necessary to identify similarities and differences between children within the same culture, as well as across cultures, and how biological, social, economic, religious, ethnic, and political orders affect the definition of childhood and determine how childhood progresses. Lillehammer, in 2018, stated, “It is of the greatest importance that the archaeology of childhood remains a separate subject and research field unto itself.” We must consider how we become more inclusive of children and childhood, studying them as their own entities remembering that children are relevant to the study of anthropology because it is the process in which we learn to be human.