The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood

Real understanding of past societies is not possible without including children, and yet they have been strangely invisible in the archaeological record. Compelling explanation about past societies cannot be achieved without including and investigating children and childhood. However marginal the traces of children's bodies and bricolage may seem compared to adults, archaeological evidence of children and childhood can be found in the most astonishing places and spaces. The archaeology of childhood is one of the most exciting and challenging areas for new discovery about past societies. Children are part of every human society, but childhood is a cultural construct. Each society develops its own idea about what a childhood should be, what children can or should do, and how they are trained to take their place in the world. Children also play a part in creating the archaeological record itself. In this volume, experts from around the world ask questions about childhood - thresholds of age and growth, childhood in the material culture, the death of children, and the intersection of the childhood and the social, economic, religious, and political worlds of societies in the past.

1 - The Archaeology of Childhood: The Birth and Development of A Discipline
2 - The History of the Archaeology of Childhood
3 - Techniques For Identifying the Age and Sex of Children at Death
4 - The Study of Growth in Skeletal Populations
5 - Cultural Models of Stages in the Life Course
6 - Infants and Mothers: Linked Lives and Embodied Life Courses
7 - Prehistoric Households and Childhood: Growing Up in a Daily Routine
8 - Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence For Infancy in the Roman World
9 - Roman Household Organization
10 - Material Culture and Childhood In Harappan South Asia
11 - Working-Class Childhood In Nineteenth-Century New York City
12 - Learning the Tools of Survival in the Thule and Dorset Cultures of Arctic Canada
13 - Educating Victorian Children: A Material Culture Perspective from Cambridge
14 - Above and Below the Surface: Environment, Work, Death, and Upbringing In Sixteenth to Seventeenth-Century Sweden
15 - Boys at Sea: An Osteological and Historical Analysis of Ships' Boys In the Late Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth-Century British Royal Navy
16 - Training Children for Work In the Nineteenth Century: Material Culture Approaches
17 - Portrait of a Palaeolithic Family: Art, Ornamentation, and Children's Relationship with their Community
18 - Care and Socialization of Children in the Bronze Age
19 - Representations of Children in Ancient Greece
20 - Children's Graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum
21 - Vecino Archaeology and the Politics of Play in New Mexico
22 - Children and Migration
23 - The Developing Forager: Reconstructing Childhood Activity Patterns from Long Bone Cross-Sectional Geometry
24 - Feeding Infants from the Iron Age to the Early Medieval Period in Britain
25 - Disease and Trauma in the Children from Roman Britain
26 - Infant Head Shaping in the First Millennium AD
27 - The Contribution of Stable Isotope Analysis to The Study of Childhood Movement and Migration
28 - Where are the Children? Locating Children in Funerary Space in the Ancient Greek World
29 - Miniature Adults? Children in Ancient Egyptian Iconography
30 - Roman Sarcophagi and Children
31 - Child Sacrifice in the Ancient Andes
32 - Miniature Adults? The Representation of Children and Childhood in Medieval Art
33 - Children's Burial Grounds (Cillíní) in Ireland: New Insights into an Early Modern Religious Tradition
34 - Gazing on the Past (and Being Photobombed by Children): Archaeology, The Early Years Of Modern Photography, and the Visible/Invisible Child
35 - From The Archaeology Of Childhood to Modern Children Visiting Archaeological Museums: An Italian Perspective
36 - Material Culture, Museums, Movies, and Make Believe: Representing Medieval Childhood
37 - Presenting Children from the Distant Past in Museums

Sally Crawford is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, she is widely published on Anglo-Saxon archaeology and the archaeology of childhood and is a co-founder and current President of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past. Dawn Hadley is Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Dawn has published extensively on Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age archaeology, and on the archaeology of identity. She is also is a Committee member of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past, and Honorary Secretary of the Society for Medieval Archaeology. Gillian Shepherd is the Director of the A.D. Trendall Research Centre for Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Lecturer in Ancient Mediterranean Studies at La Trobe University. She has published extensively on the archaeology of Greek Sicily and South Italy, especially with regard to burial customs, childhood, and identity. She is also founding and former Committee member of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.