Introduction

Over the past two decades, there has been an increase in research on infancy and childhood in the social sciences with significant developments in method and theory on the topic in anthropology, sociology and history (Alanen 2014; Baxter 2005; Gottlieb 2000; Heywood 2017; James and Prout 2015; Lewis 2006, 2017; Lillehammer 2015; Nowell and Kurki 2020). Anthropological and historical approaches have moved from simply seeking to find and include infants and children in interpretations, towards more sophisticated understandings of the multivocality of infancy and childhood, their roles, and their relationships with caregivers, family and society (Baxter 2005; Gowland and Halcrow 2020; Heywood 2017; Kendall and Kendall 2021; Lillehammer 2015). Within these disciplines, there has been an adoption of a sophisticated appreciation of social life course theory, agency and resilience, and the archaeology of care, emotion and grief (Gowland 2015; Inglis and Halcrow 2018; Lewis 2006, 2017). In anthropological science there has been significant development of methodological advances in chemical and molecular analysis of food remains, sampling techniques for infant feeding and weaning, and a development of theoretical sophistication to understand their biological and social fragility from a lifecourse, the maternal–infant nexus and developmental origins of health and disease perspective (Beaumont and Montgomery 2015; Dunne et al. 2019; Gowland 2015; Gowland and Halcrow 2020; Halcrow et al. 2017). The collection of papers in this special issue showcase research on infancy and childhood with sophisticated theoretical and methodological approaches to this topic. These papers are particularly fitting for Childhood in the Past: An International Journal, an interdisciplinary forum for the publication of research on all aspects of childhood in the past, which transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries and time periods. This issue represents a significant contribution to understanding the role of children and childhood during the transition to urbanization in Europe through the lens of multiple approaches, including bioarchaeological, archaeological, cognitive developmental (palaeoanthropological), sociological and historical research on infants and children, using a variety of new analytical techniques. This issue is organized chronologically from the consideration of cognitive development during prehistory to the nineteenth-century urban environment. The first paper by Coward and Howard-Jones explores the possible role of early infant cognitive development in technological innovation during prehistory. They explore why infancy is a special time in terms of the potential for the environment to impact cognitive development and compare the experiences of infants within small-scale foraging and small-scale agrarian societies. Coward and Howard-Jones argue that a small-scale agrarian