Editorial

Abstract

It is with much pleasure that I welcome you to the spring issue of Volume thirteen of Childhood in the Past, the journal of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (SSCIP). The issue starts with a thought-provoking invited piece by Farah Mendlesohn which explores the genre of books for children in relation to historical fiction. Farah delivered the Society’s inaugural biennial lecture in 2017 in Staffordshire University, UK, and we are delighted that she was able to write this piece so that all those who could not attend the lecture can learn more about her interesting research. 2019 was another busy year for SSCIP. The twelfth international SSCIP conference, was organized by Katie Hemer and Sophie Newman on 30th October to 1st November, and hosted by the Sheffield Centre for the Archaeology of Childhood in the University of Sheffield. The theme of the conference was ‘Adolescence’ with the aim of exploring how scholars from diverse fields of research can offer nuanced insight into the lives of those occupying this unique stage in the life course in the past. The conference commenced on the Wednesday evening with a keynote presentation by Jane Eva Baxter of DePaul University, USA, on the topic of the late nineteenth/ early twentieth-century invention of adolescence, followed by a wine reception. The following two action-packed days saw the delivery of some nineteen papers and five posters across six thematic sessions What is Adolescence? Shifting Perceptions Over Time and Space; The Written Lives of Adolescents; The Material Culture of Adolescence; Little Adults? Rites of Passage from Childhood to Adulthood; Deviancy, Rebellion, and Punishment, and Advances in Accessing Adolescence in Bioarchaeology. On the Friday morning Mary Lewis of the University of Reading, UK, delivered a keynote talk on the topic of the bioarchaeology of adolescence. The conference also saw the introduction of a prize for the best student podium presentation kindly sponsored by the journal Antiquity. This was awarded to Katherine Woodhouse of Loughborough University, UK, for her paper entitled ‘Rebels With a Cause: Conversion and “Meaningful” Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Methodist Narratives of Female Adolescence’. The conference was a truly international affair which brought together scholars from eight countries and crossed three continents. The Society is very grateful to the conference organizers for all their efforts in arranging the event on this fascinating theme within past childhood research. In addition to the annual conference, a SSCIP-sponsored session entitled ‘Health and Welfare of Children in the Past’ was organized by Esme Hookway and Kirsty Squires of Staffordshire University at the 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology which took place on the 10th–14th April in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Speakers from New Zealand, Mexico, and the UK came together to explore a range of topics, including childhood health and disease, the care of children, funerary treatment, and the welfare of children in the work-place. Ian Gonzalez Alaña (independent researcher), Mélie Le Roy and Eileen Murphy of Queen’s University Belfast, organized a SSCIP-sponsored session entitled ‘Systemic Approaches to Juvenile Funerary Rituals. Atypical, Deviant or Normative? Going Beyond Paradigms’ at the 25th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists that took place on the 4th– 7th September in Bern, Switzerland. This was a very popular session, with twenty-two oral presentations and four posters, that brought researchers from some thirteen countries together to share their experiences of childhood burial from prehistory to early modern times across Europe and North Africa.