Child Bioarchaeology: Perspectives on the Past 10 Years (original) (raw)
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Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2008
Recently, the value of the study of children and childhood from archaeological contexts has become more recognized. Childhood is both a biological and a social phenomenon. However, because of specialization in research fields within anthropology, subadults from the archaeological record are usually studied from the biological perspective (bioarchaeology) or, more predominantly, the social perspective (social archaeology), with little research that incorporates both approaches. These polarized approaches to childhood and age highlight the dualistic way in which "biological" and "social" aspects of the body are viewed. Some recent literature criticizes bioarchaeological approaches, and calls for the incorporation of childhood social theory, including social age categories, into subadult health analysis. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the practicalities or theoretical issues that need to be considered when attempting this. This paper critically examines these issues, including terminology used for defining subadulthood and age divisions within it, and approaches to identify "social age" in past populations. The important contribution that bioarchaeology can make to the study of social aspects of childhood is outlined. Recent theoretical approaches for understanding the body offer exciting opportunities to incorporate skeletal remains into research, and develop a more biologically and socially integrated understanding of childhood and age.
2018
Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in the amount of research on children and childhood in the past from anthropological, archaeological and bioarchaeological perspectives. In previous decades under-representation of children in the archaeological record was often cited as being the result of poor preservation, lack of recovery and small sample size. However, it is now acknowledged that this was more of a perception than the reality (e.g. Lewis 2007; Halcrow and Tayles 2011). Feminist archaeologists noted that prior to the 1970s, many archaeologists were more interested in analysing the ‘important’ male skeletal remains than those of women and children. When Grete Lillehammer published her landmark paper “A Child is Born” in 1989, it appeared that researchers answered her pleas for archaeologists to recognise the presence of children in the archaeological records of the past, as since then, there has been a substantial increase in archaeological and anthropological research about children and childhood (for example, Baxter 2005, 2008; Crawford and Lewis 2008; Halcrow and Tayles 2008, 2011; Kamp 2001; Lancy 2008; Lewis 2007; Lillehammer 1989; Schwartzman 2005; Sofaer Deverenski 2000, 2011; Wileman 2005). However, a key difficulty, and therefore focus, in studying children in the past has centred around differences in the terminology used to define a child, measuring and understanding the biological, cultural and social meanings of the ages, or stages of childhood. Research among the various sub-fields of biological anthropology, archaeology, and anthropology continues to be hampered by the number of disparate theoretical approaches to childhood in the past, leaving a feeling that Lillehammer’s ‘child’ is taking just a bit too long to ‘grow up’. David Lancy’s (2012b, Figure 1) analogy of the field of the Anthropology of Childhood as a house with separate rooms with no interconnections between so aptly describes the state of the sub-disciplines in childhood studies at times, and has in consequence, had an impact on achieving coherence in the research approaches. In addition, the lack of theoretical development around how to interpret the nuances of childhood within their culturally fluid and socially dynamic contexts has also impeded research on the bioarchaeology of children. This chapter reviews the development of the bioarchaeological study of childhood and important theoretical issues including age, gender, and the biocultural approach and offers suggestions for the development of approaches that “speak” between the different theoretical perspectives in the study of childhood in the past. Suggested future research directions include the integration of biological aspects into the social life course approach, by incorporating aspects of the biologically underpinned life history theoretical approach. Another imperative is to critically evaluate the attribution and meaning of “agency” in bioarchaeological studies of childhood.