The Archaeology of American Childhood and Adolescence by Jane Eva Baxter (review)

Jane Eva Baxter is one of the most prominent historical archaeologists studying children and childhood. Her 2005 book, The Archaeology of Childhood, was among the first to synthesize the disparate strands of the then-nascent field of the archaeology of childhood. This 2019 follow-up, The Archaeology of American Childhood and Adolescence, is a survey of the major research themes in the historical archaeology of childhood in the United States as the field has grown over the past decade.

Baxter notes that “the American Experience” and “being American” are enduring research topics within historical archaeology. These ideas are composed of multiple, competing discourses and identities that defy a monolithic American experience; as such, there cannot be a single understanding of an American childhood. There is little explicit engagement with either social or child development theory; Baxter instead introduces five key themes in chapter 1 that underlay the field’s literature: economic and social risks/opportunities; ethnic and class diversity; consumerism; space, both geographic and social spaces exclusively for children or made by them; and disruption of family structures. These themes do not explicitly frame the book, but are emphasized to varying degrees in the subsequent chapters.

The book’s strengths lie in its balanced presentation of children on their own terms as social beings whose selective choice of ideas and behaviors for themselves in their relationships with adults circumscribe and shape childhood through time and space. For example, while toys are considered the defining evidence for children on archaeological sites, there is often little further analysis of their activities beyond play. Baxter includes discussions of various toys, but also devotes considerable attention to other artifacts such as writing slates, clothing, and ceramics to contextualize children’s experiences both as independent social actors and dependents on larger social and cultural forces.

Chapter 2 presents a chronological overview of the social histories of childhood from the colonial to modern periods, while the following chapters focus on sites dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 3 discusses children’s living and play spaces, home and family life, divided into broadly rural and urban domestic experiences. The breadth of this chapter is excellent, covering children’s lives at farms, plantations, urban areas, factory towns, and even military sites. Chapter 4’s focus on institutions is a thought-provoking inversion of the previous chapter’s focus on domestic life by considering children’s agency in compliance with or resistance to moral and physical reform, illustrated with rich discussions of artifacts recovered from sites such as Japanese internment camps, Indian boarding schools, and public schools. Chapter 5 bridges these discussions of children’s lives to their mortality with studies of skeletal remains and commemoration through gravestone design, while an interesting passage on toys and “playing at death” underscores the close relationship between children and death in the past and prefigures the following chapter’s discussions of safety and risk. The book closes with archaeological perspectives on contemporary childhood using material culture such as the ubiquitous Barbie, and emergent research on video games to highlight how adult perceptions of safety and childhood innocence influence children’s experiences and contexts of play in contemporary life.

Baxter notes that by design the book focuses on the childhoods of Euro-Americans and enslaved and free African Americans, and it mostly omits Native American children because the multiplicity of native cultures makes them difficult to cover thoughtfully. The book is also concerned with sites dating after the mid-nineteenth century, largely because this period has the most archaeological and historical data available. As Baxter accurately points out, many potential data sources on children’s presence at archaeological sites are underexamined due to the nature of archaeological practice in the United States. Still, even a cursory presentation of Native American children—particularly on sites in the northeast and southwest, where ceramic pots, stone tools, and other items made by children have been found—would have further emphasized...