A Closer Look at the Livelihoods of Children in the Past

Abstract

In past mortuary research earlier views of children within the archaeological discipline have often painted pictures of them as being irrelevant to socioeconomic life in past societies. Moreover, adult burials received preferential treatment over nonadult burials for analysis, which lead to incomplete perceptions about personhood, social adulthood, conceptions of gender, and/or pre-adolescent social identity. However, over the past two decades, archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have been paying increasing attention to infants and children and they're being recognized as active agents within their communities, and that their funerary treatments can provide significant information towards societal biosocial contexts.  The Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology volume edited by Patrick Beauchesne and Sabrina Agarwal highlights the importance of nonadult studies by bringing together a wide-range of bioarchaeological scholars who discuss biocultural, life history, and life-course approaches towards enriching children and childhood studies in antiquity that integrate socio-cultural, biological, and archaeological lines of evidence.