Children and their Childhoods

Retrospectives and Prospectives

Bibliographic Data

ID19005255
AuthorsKathryn A Kamp (Grinnell College, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume8
Issue2
Pages161-169
Publication date2015-08-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueChildhood in the Past (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1758-5716 • E-ISSN: 2040-8528
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1758571615z.00000000037
OpenAlexW1938239299
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited17

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

Sociology · Child and Animal Learning Development

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