The Archaeology of American Childhood and Adolescence

Children and childhoods have been a neglected topic within historical archaeology, often with a limited or only passing reference to children when a toy is uncovered at a site. However, since the 2000s, the study has started to gain favour in the field as archaeologist’s transition away from simply noting the presence of children into more in-depth discussions of children as social agents. Negotiating the archaeology of children and childhood in America is difficult given the spectrum of definitions, ideologies and social constructs; for example, how does the author define children or childhood? What are the temporal and spatial ranges of the study? And how is the intersectionality of identities such as class, ethnicity, gender, and race addressed by the author? On one hand, the threat is that the author can be overly ambitious and attempt to cover every subtopic, every time period, and every culture, thus presenting the audience with a disjointed bricolage of writing that only touches upon important issues without providing a thorough analysis. On the other hand, the author runs the risk of neglecting the diversity of the past and thus can create a work that homogenizes the study of children and childhood. The key for the scholar is to discuss the heterogeneity and intersectionality of the past while also narrowing the scope of the work into a concise narrative. For the most part, Jane Eva Baxter is able to accomplish this difficult task in her book, The Archaeology of American Childhood and Adolescence. This book is very much a sequel to Baxter’s 2005 book, The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture, in which she discussed similar topics but without the explicit purview of ‘American Childhood’. While restricting the range of childhood and adolescence to one nation helps to narrow the focus of the book, it also brings up a question: is there a monolithic identity of being American? Baxter attempts to answer this question by stating that,