Editorial

Abstract

Welcome to the Spring issue of Volume 15 of Childhood in the Past, the journal of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP). Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, 2021 was an active year for the Society. In May, Creighton Avery from McMaster University, Canada, delivered the biannual SSCIP lecture online on the topic of: ‘Gendered Childhood Diets: An Analysis of Dietary Stable Isotopes in Tooth Dentine in Roman Gaul’. A new book entitled The Family in Past Perspective: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Familial Relationships through Time, edited by SSCIP Treasurer Ellen Kendall, and Ross Kendall, was published by Routledge in June. The volume was based on papers presented at SSCIP’s nineth annual conference held in Durham University in 2016. A SSCIP session entitled ‘Tracing Baptism in the Archaeological Record’, organised by Colm Donnelly (Queen’s University Belfast), Mark Guillon (UMR 5199 Bordeaux University), Emilie Portat (Paris Nanterre University) and I, was held as part of the 27th annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists which took place online in September. The 13th annual SSCIP conference was held virtually in October and was organised by our Book Reviews Editor, Siân Halcrow of the University of Otago, New Zealand. The conference was scheduled as eight short sessions over four days to accommodate the different time zones of participants. Keynote addresses were given by Maureen Carroll of the University of York, Alison Behie of The Australian National University, Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island, and Sarah Knott of Indiana University Bloomington. The conference was a truly international affair and a total of 34 lectures were delivered involving researchers from 17 different countries. The Society is extremely grateful to Siân for all her efforts to organise what was a hugely successful conference. The next SSCIP annual conference is being organised by Daniel Justel Vicente and will take place at the University of Alcalá (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain) on 8–10th November 2022. The next volume in the SSCIP monograph series – Normative, Atypical or Deviant? Interpreting Prehistoric and Protohistoric Child Burial Practices (edited by Eileen Murphy and Mélie Le Roy) – will hopefully be out later this year and will be the tenth in the series. We are always happy to receive proposals for future monographs and these should be submitted to Lynne McKerr, General Editor of the monograph series, following the guidelines provided on the SSCIP website. Volume 15 of our journal commences with an invited piece by Creighton Avery, Tracy Prowse, Sheri Findlay and Megan Brickley, entitled ‘Bioarchaeological Approaches to the Study of Adolescence’. The paper explores why this phase of the life course has received limited attention until recent years and discusses how macroscopic and biochemical approaches can be used to investigate evidence for adolescence in the skeletal record. This is followed by three research papers. In the first, Charlotte King et al. explore the experiences of childhood among the first European settlers of colonial Otago, New Zealand. By combining dental palaeopathology with incremental isotopic evidence derived from dentitions and hair from children interred in St. John’s Milton cemetery they demonstrate how weaning practices in the 19th-century colony differed from those experienced by their emigrant parents. They also identify periods of illness that may have been associated with the