New Book Chronicle

Antiquity, Sept, 2007 by Madeleine Hummler

Children, they say, should be seen, not heard. But are we seeing enough of them in the archaeological record? This is what we shall first consider, reviewing a couple of very different books on the subject. The step from children to food is easily taken, and we shall pass into the kitchen to look at a crop of books that focus on preparation consumption and identity. Ancient History does not often feature in Antiquity but gets a brief mention here, as do the antiquities of Cyprus.

Children

MARY E. LEWIS. The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology. x 256 pages, 37 illustrations, 15 tables. 2006. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-83602-9 hardback 70 [pounds sterling] & $130.

TRACI ARDREN & SCOTT R. HUTSON (ed.). The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica. xxii 310 pages, 73 illustrations, 11 tables. 2006. Boulder (CO): University Press of Colorado; 978-0-87081-827-1 hardback $45.

'The study of non-adult skeletal remains is finally gaining the recognition it deserves and it continues to be one of the most challenging and exciting areas of research in bioarchaeology' (p. 188). That is how MARY LEWIS ends her Bioarchaeology of Children, an overview of the subject that I would highly recommend, not just to those who deal with the primary data and their interpretation, but to any archaeologist who, in the course of his or her work, recovers human remains or is in a position to commission work upon them. Indeed, it is thanks to greater awareness of child remains, coupled with recent advances in biological and forensic anthropology, that much more can be said about children, once archaeologically almost invisible. That there are taphonomic issues (chapter 2) as well as social and cultural factors, not to mention biases in curation or the skills of excavators, that contribute to the under-representation of children is acknowledged. Nevertheless, attempts at aging and sexing children (chapter 3) are meeting with a measure of success and allow us to follow the growth of children (chapter 4), a veritable parcours du combattant that takes the child from birth (chapter 5), through weaning (chapter 6), to disease (chapter 7) and trauma (chapter 8). Reading this, it seems incredible that any child actually managed to survive. But of course 'children in an archaeological sample represent the non-survivors of any given population, and their pattern of growth or frequency of lesions might not be an accurate reflection of the living population of children who survived into adulthood' (p. 185). Conversely, there are many causes of death or illnesses in children that would leave no trace in the osteological record (or minute traces not always recovered: for example, ear infections may be detected, but 'diagnosis relies on the individual recovery of the tiny ear ossicles, or the use of an endoscope in situ' (p. 138). If these points are obvious, they are still well worth making. The Bioarchaeology of Children is an excellent way for non-specialists to understand what can and cannot be deduced from the data; sentiments are not spared--there are extensive passages on infanticide or child abuse--but the author is always very careful to warn us not to jump to conclusions and to provide alternative models.

Diametrically opposed is the The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica, a collection of papers from a 2002 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, edited by ARDREN & HUTSON. They approach children, not as biologically defined non-adults, but as 'historical agents who have voices and agency in any civilization, however muted' (Ardren, p. 16), as social beings 'progressively indoctrinated into the gendered roles of adulthood' (McCafferty & McCafferty, p. 45), a process traced in stages (equivalent to Lewis's biological stages): 'children do not reach adulthood passively ... but by cultural achievement, the culmination of a long material transformation of raw infants into socially produced agents' (Hutson, p. 109). And so on, preached with evangelical fervour. As anyone who has had to clean a raw infant at one end and argue the finer points of personal freedom with a near-adult at the other will know, there is no need to invoke Heidegger or Bourdieu to appreciate that young humans are biological and social beings, and the passage from one to the other not a one-way trajectory. That is not to say that there are no excellent contributions in this volume (for example a fine analysis by Storey & McAnany of children's burials in the Formative Maya village of X'acob, or an interesting comparison of child martyrs and murderers in late medieval/ Renaissance Europe and Mesoamerica, by Elsworth Hamann), but these lie hidden in a fog of verbiage. To wit: 'the way that children ... participated in daily practices in the household has the potential to provide crucial multivocalic perspectives about the processes of structuration' (Lopiparo, p. 134). Right, next time I ask my own offsprings for such participation and meet ipod-induced incomprehension, I'll know to put it down to multivocalic perspectives. Quipping apart, this book is at once useful and irritating. Irritating because it veers towards wishful thinking (there is, for example, a lot pinned on the find of a single shell in an abandoned house at Chunchucmil (Hutson, chapter 5); notice too the change in mood in Lopiparo, who tells us that children might have been involved in the production of artefacts--moulded figurines in the Ulua valley, Honduras--and abandons the conditional in her concluding paragraph (p. 161: 'they learned', 'they participated', 'they embodied', etc.). But useful too, as the collection reminds us that 'children are everywhere', that the entire archaeological record is owed to them, whether their lives were interrupted or whether we see their achievement as adults.