Summary: | Real understanding of past societies is not possible without including children, and yet they have been strangely invisible in the archaeological record. In this volume, experts from around the world investigate childhood in the past, showing why it is important to understand childhood, why different cultures construct different ideas of how to rear children, what part children play in the community, and when and why childhood ends. The contributors also question why childhood has so often been missing from archaeological interpretation. Their answers are astonishing and thought provoking, challenging archaeologists to reconsider common assumptions about ways of looking at material culture in the past, and to reconsider the place of children in creating the archaeological record itself.
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