Tracing Childhood: Bioarchaeological Investigations of Early Lives in Antiquity

Introduction. Children in Prehistory: Now Seen, Now Heard

Introduction Children in Prehistory Now Seen, Now Heard Jennifer L. Thompson, John J. Crandall, and Marta P. Alfonso-Durruty The archaeology of children is not just about children themselves but rather about the relationships children have with their environment, their peers and members of their family and community. Emphasizing the relationships children have with the world around them, both natural and cultural, and acknowledging the diverse contributions children can and do make in different cultural settings means that the archaeology of childhood is not a discrete specialization that should be practiced by a few archaeologists. Baxter 2005: 114 While other mammals progress, in an almost seamless fashion, from infancy toward adulthood, our species is unique in that we are the only creature exhibiting a period following infancy where a youngster is freed from breastfeeding but still dependent on others for provisioning and protection (Bogin 1997, 1999, 2006, 2009). Childhood is at the core of our common evolutionary history, as well as our individual socialization. Thus, childhood , as a universal life history stage, attracts wide scientific interest, being that it is a phenomenon that exists at the intersection of biology, society and culture (Ingold 2001). It is precisely because of this that anthropology is well suited to study the emergence and impact of children throughout time (Konner 2010; Lamb and Hewlett 2005; Lancy 2008). However, understanding the treatment and contribution of children outside modern Western contexts has proven difficult as studies usually emphasize adult roles, to the detriment of children’s contributions (Hirschfeld 2002), and focus on how children are acculturated or shaped by others (LeVine 2007). Only recently, following a wave of feminist theory in the 1990s, have scholars 2 · J. L. Thompson, J. J. Crandall, and M. P. Alfonso-Durruty turned toward understanding children’s impacts on the world as well as how children and childhood (their lived experiences) have been shaped through time and across cultures (e.g., Bird and Bliege Bird 2005; Lancy 2008; Sofaer Derevenski 2000). While the term childhood has a particular meaning in evolutionary biology , as a life history stage unique to our species, the term child is used in anthropology, particularly bioarchaeology, more broadly to encompass all subadults (or non-adults) in a society. Thus, readers should not be surprised to see these terms used variously throughout this volume. Life history theory tells us that we experience at least four stages of growth prior to reaching adulthood: infancy, childhood, juvenility, and adolescence, each with biological, psychological, and behavioral markers delimiting them (Bogin 2009). However, living societies do not universally categorize nonadult individuals in this way, with some societies simply dividing all their members into people and non-people (Chapters 1 and 11). In other words, these life stages are useful when they are used to assess the changing social role of individuals over the life course or to gauge the likely competencies of individuals at certain ages, since size, cognitive development, and manual dexterity affect an individual’s abilities (Chapter 9). In other cases these stages are less useful tools for analyzing subadult roles in society. For that reason, while recognizing childhood as a life history stage, this volume allowed authors to use the terms child and children as a broad category that could include all subadults (non-adults) or subgroups of them (e.g., infant, child, juvenile, adolescent). Moreover, authors were not tasked with using the same age ranges to define these subgroups. This approach allowed the flexibility needed to interpret results within each unique historic or prehistoric social, economic, and/or environmental setting. This means that there is inevitably some variation in age categories and terminology between chapters, but there is internal consistency in the terms used within each chapter. Understanding subadult social identity, behavior, and treatment in the past has proven challenging. Archaeologists have increasingly recognized that children comprise a significant portion of all ancient communities (Chamberlain 1997) and, given this, must have had some appreciable impact on their social group and surroundings (Friedel 2002; Sofaer Derevenski 1997). Although bioarchaeology has contributed research on past identities (Knudson and Stojanowski 2009), previous bioarchaeological contributions to the study of children’s experiences, treatment, and agency have been limited. The goal of this book is to remedy this by providing a Introduction. Children in Prehistory: Now Seen, Now Heard · 3 broad array of studies that integrate social theory, as well as historic, ethnographic , bioarchaeological, and archaeological data to examine this critical...