On 13th October, the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past held a stall for the second year running at the Big Biology Day at Staffordshire University. This year, PhD students Esme Hookway (Staffordshire University) and Marion Shiner (University of Sheffield) ran activities on the theme of childhood development, created by Dr Kirsty […]
The 11th annual conference of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past was held from the 22nd – 24th September 2018 at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, Austria. This awe-inspiring museum is world renowned for its collections and is home to the Venus of Willendorf. The theme of this year’s […]
This week I’m tweeting for @RealScientists. Please come by and say hello. Here is my intro: http://realscientists.org/2018/09/29/ancient-family-bioarchaeology-infant-health-and-disease/ by Sarah Faber · September 29, 2018 Real Scientists is in Aotearoa/New Zealand this week with Dr Siân Halcrow (@ancientchildren), a bioarchaeologist and associate professor at the University of Otago. Her research focuses on historical infant and child […] […]
Yesterday, the ‘Children at Work’ session was held at the European Assocaition of Archaeologists meeting in Barcelona, organised by Melie Le Roy (Queen’s University, Belfast) and Caroline Polet (Universite libre de Bruxelles). The session involved papers ranging from the Neolithic to the 19th century and focused on various European countries as well as the US. […]
Despite the breaking news about this ‘child’, this may have been an adult. Read more below. Breaking news about an astonishing find of a child is hitting international news. The paper presents the genome of ‘Denisova 11’, who is represented by a small bone fragment from Denisova Cave in Russia. The authors found that the […]
At the National Memorial Arboretum, a second dimension of movement in memorials to children takes the form of the Edward’s Trust Memorial (for the first dimension, follow this link). This memorial is situated in a cluster of child-associated memories including the ‘Every Which Way’ (discussed in a previous blog) memorial commemorating evacuees of the Second […]
Archaeologists frequently talk about monuments in relation to movement. Monuments can commemorate migrations, diasporas and dislocations from place for past living people, and the bodies of the dead (aka cenotaphs). Also, monuments and memorials can readily depict movement of people, animals and things in symbolic ways. They might require movement through their location and relationship […] […]
There is a romanticised view that pre-Hispanic societies from the Canary Islands lived in a ‘paradise on earth’ without violence and conflict. However, recent work by anthropologists has shown that there is evidence for intentional trauma in adults from pre-Hispanic sites suggesting inter-personal violence. A recently published paper has found that the young were not […] […]
A new book Unearthing childhood: Young lives in prehistory by Robin Derricourt is a unique and fully comprehensive survey of children across all of prehistory, from Australopithecines to the eve of civilisation. Robin discusses a range of themes, including birth and motherhood, family and development, food, clothing and adornment, learning crafts and skills, play and […]