As with young parents who postponed to find a babysitter for Saturday night, children have long remained a background issue for many of the archeologists that study humankind in the Ice Age. ¹ Both the parents and the archeologists obviously have their reasons, understandable as well as less understandable. But as befits a blog on the humanities, and with apologies to any young parents out there, today we are going to focus on the archeologists. Why did children up until recently constitute a rather minor concern for these scholars? And could our knowledge of the distant past profit from centering the younger humans more? Those questions – and more! – will be answered below. These answers are mostly sourced from a great book on the subject, Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children by paleolithic archeologist April Nowell, which I cannot recommend enough for those whose interest is piqued.²

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The Cool Era That Was the Ice Age

The Ice Age is a fascinating period, and not merely for those who skip dinner for desert. ³ It is a world that is at once thoroughly familiar and bafflingly alien. To give an example of the latter which has always excited me: Where the Persian Gulf now separates the Arabian Peninsula from the Persian Plateau there used to be a valley with a meandering river surrounded by all kinds of lakes. A veritable lost world where humans lived until they were forced to move away when the ice up north melted and the seas rose.⁴ But the familiarity of the Ice Age is perhaps as immediate, thanks in part to the universal experiences of our distant ancestors. They had to survive, just like us. And they were once young, just like us. This universality is naturally not comparable in all aspects. Many more of those who were young in the Ice Age, for instance, would never be old. The higher child mortality that is projected for this period also means that children would be less surrounded by peers while growing up, than could be expected today.⁵ It is nonetheless estimated that children comprised at least 40% to 65% of those wandering the world before the Holocene.⁶ And in the absence of Tamagotchi’s, Gameboys, and smartphones, children were involved with almost all aspects of life.⁷ Whether it be knapping stone, making tools, exploring secret spaces, acquire food, or partake in storytelling experiences – Ice Age children did it all, together with adults or on their own.⁸

This comprehensive presence of children makes it all the more curious that they are relatively understudied. Why then is this the case? The aforementioned April Nowell discerns four main reasons: The quantity and nature of the archeological remains of children; the long-held idea that children are distorters of the archeological record; the lack of agency attributed to children; and an absence of interest in children as a proper research topic for archeologists.⁹ Let us try and understand those four reasons in turn.

“Ice age fauna of northern Spain” by Mauricio Antón. Licenced through Creative Commons.¹⁰

Reason 1: The Quantity and Nature of the Archeological Remains of Children

There are, in the first place, simply fewer remains of children to be excavated. And the remains that we can find are often less well conserved. Let us first explore why there are fewer remains. The human remains at the disposal of archeologists often comprise fewer humans than those that used to live in the area.¹¹ This is due to several factors. The limited number of burial grounds that come to be excavated by archeologists might not be the final resting place of all of the persons that resided in that area. People in the Ice Age had a highly mobile lifestyle. Their survival required sustenance and their strategy to acquire said sustenance often included a lot of travel.¹² As a consequence, those who died may be buried over a very large expanse. In addition, not all the dead may have had equal access to the excavated burial grounds.¹³ Particularly in later, more sedentary societies we can observe that there were special resting places for certain categories of people. The famous tombs for dignitaries in the Valley of Kings in Egypt, for example, or the various incarnations of cemeteries associated with those places where people with leprosy were secluded.¹⁴ The same might be true for children in the Ice Age.¹⁵ As a result, we can never be certain that the part of the population that is exhumed by archeologists represents all buried persons.¹⁶ This variation in the archeological record has consequences for our knowledge of human life in the Ice Age, and this variation is compounded by the conditions modern archeologists have to work with.

It is important to realize that not all excavated burial places are treated equally. Some sites are only excavated superficially or partially.¹⁷ But, perhaps more importantly, the conditions pertaining to the survival of human remains differ. As one might imagine, sturdier bones have a better chance to survive than relatively brittle bones, and in a better state at that.¹⁸ And children’s bones are, as a matter of fact, more porous, incompletely ossified, less mineralized, and in other ways more fragile than those of adults. Still, their bones are often less prominent in excavation reports than they could have been, even considering the fragility of children’s remains. This is because of the methods employed and the training received by most archeologists. Both of these are not sufficiently focused on the presence of children in the archeological record.¹⁹ And this not the only way in which the attitudes of modern archeologists can inhibit the study of children in the Ice Age.

Reason 2: Children as Distorters of the Archeological Record

Until recently the behavior of children and their use of objects was commonly perceived as distorting archeologically relevant sites.²⁰ And this notion might appear intuitive. Have we not all encountered children who displace or even discard objects in places where no adult would place or discard them?²¹ However, it can be argued that these activities are also part of the past and part of the behavior of human beings in the Ice Age that archeologists aim to study!²²

Because those snapshots of the past that archeologists excavate are seldom undisturbed.²³ The site surveyed may have already been abandoned in the past – and anybody who has ever moved house will know that this leaves a less than perfect picture of how the place used to be before! In addition, many human activities leave imperfect traces. After working stone, for example, humans of the past tended to clean up.²⁴ And, of course, archeological snapshots are just that, a moment in time in which the site entered the archeological record. We might miss out on clues regarding many other uses in the period before the site was left to the elements, burned down, or buried.²⁵ Speaking of the elements, there are the workings of nature. One might imagine natural forces, such as earthquakes, erosion, and flooding exact their toll on archeological sites.²⁶ Because of these circumstances, it is regularly up to archologists to determine what counts as a disturbance or not. And the activities of children should arguably be studied with as much zeal as those of the adults, if we want to know the past.

Reason 3: The Lack of Agency Attributed to Children

But one might ask whether familiarity with the activities of children improves our knowledge of the past. Are children not merely following the directions of parents, family members, and other adults?²⁷ Even if one would subscribe to this notion, studying children could still be worthwhile, as their behavior – as far as it can be gleaned from the archeological record – might reveal to us a lot about those directions and the adult world for which these children were prepared.²⁸ However, children can also teach us much about the daily life of humans in the Ice age through the remnants of them exercising their own agency, which exceeded preparing for and participating in the adult world.²⁹

Because children in that distant past had an impact on the archeological record of their own accord.³⁰ They often had their own uses of objects which differed from adults, as we saw above, and this would include employing them as toys in ways that do not entirely reflect the contemporary adult world.³¹ And also in other ways, they might have gone against the past norms and rules of the adult world. As Erin Halstad McGuire notes: “children […] may subvert adult activities and material culture for their own purposes.”³² In all these ways children are interesting to study for archeologists looking to reconstruct human life in the Ice Age, despite the aforementioned difficulties with the archeological record. So why did these kinds of studies relatively rarely happened until recently?

Reason 4: The Absence of Interest in Children as a Proper Research Topic for Archeologists

In addition to the reputation of children as distorters of the archeological record and mere extensions of the adult world, April Nowell also suggests that the longstanding absence of interest in this part of humankind in the Ice Age might have to do with the perception that the topic is “not […] ‘weighty’ or ‘serious’ enough to become mainstream.”³³ She connects this perception to the fact that it is traditionally women who study this aspect of archeology. Because, as Margaret Conkey demonstrated, the theoretical work of female archeologists is relatively under cited and rather often published through somewhat more obscure channels.³⁴ In addition, when children were included as a research topic, the researchers regularly tended to focus on specific questions, such as the impact of disease or methods of child rearing, which left less room for other essential aspects of the lived experience of children.³⁵

These preconceived notions about what topics are important enough to be studied in the archeological departments of academic institutions, are essential to recognize and discuss.³⁶ Apart from the role of children in the story of humankind during the Ice Age, one might think, for example, of the prioritization of daytime human activities in archeological research and theory at the expense of the night.³⁷ As is shown by a recent chapter by Glenn Storey on, amongst other nocturnal subjects, nighttime crime in the ancient Roman world, such research might also pique the interest of a large public – if the popularity of the true crime genre is any indication!³⁸ More in general, as April Nowell states, archeologists “have largely assumed that the archaeological record did not speak to the lived experiences of women, children, the elderly, the differently abled, non-binary genders, different sexualities, different ethnicities or Indigenous peoples, when in fact it always has, we have just not been listening or more precisely we have not been asking the right questions.”³⁹

Conclusion: Won’t Anybody Think of the Children!?

The lost children of archeology luckily turned out not to be entirely missing, they are just somewhat harder to find and were historically neglected. And it is an exciting prospect that a new wave of interest in this part of human life in the Ice Age is increasingly taken up by archeologists.⁴⁰ Because, just as with the parents who also look forward to return from their Saturday evening sojourn to the cinema, it is not advisable to ignore children all too long.

For anybody who wants to know more about life in the Ice Age, I can recommend several other volumes beside Nowell’s book. One great introduction about how the idea of an Ice Age became accepted in the first place and how we can know anything about the world in this cool era at all, is Jamie Woodward’s The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction.⁴¹ More information about the relative absence of certain demographics in earlier archeological research can be found in Jane Baxter’s The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture.⁴² And if one wants to see the bigger picture of how the humans of the Ice Age fit in the larger picture of our story, the edited volume The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies is a great place to start.⁴³ Next week, we return to the more recent past and discuss the best albums of 2023.

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References

1. April Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2021), p. 1.
2. Ibidem.
3. The era of alternating Ice Ages and postglacial periods that is (most) relevant for this blog started ca. 800.000 years ago. The last Ice Age ended around 11.600 years ago, see: Chris Scarre, “The World Transformed: From Foragers and Farmers to States and Empires,” in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 175.
4. Tony Wilkinson, “Introduction to Geography, Climate, Topography, and Hydrology,” in: Daniel Potts (ed.), A Companion to the Archeology of the Ancient Near East (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), p. 19–20.
5. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 153–54. For the difficulties surrounding our estimations of child mortality in the distant past, see: April Nowell and Jennifer French, “Adolescence and Innovation in the European Upper Palaeolithic,” Evolutionary Human Sciences 2020, 2 (36), p. 15.
6. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 1.
7. Ibidem, 71; Flavio Altamura et al., “Archaeology and Ichnology at Gombore II-2, Melka Kunture, Ethiopia: Everyday Life of a Mixed-Age Hominin Group 700,000 Years Ago,” Scientific Reports 2018, 8 (2815), p. 9.
8. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, Chapter 3-5.
9. Ibidem, p. 1–14.
10. Licensing via Creative Commons: “Ice age fauna of northern Spain” by Mauricio Antón. Source: “Caitlin Sedwick (1 April 2008). “What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?”. PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099.” Permission for reuse: “© 2008 Public Library of Science. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.” No changes were made. Obtained via: Wikimedia Commons.
11. Ibidem, p. 2.
12. Ibidem, p. 44-45; Martin Sikora et al, “Ancient Genomes Show Social and Reproductive Behavior of Early Upperpaleolithic Foragers, Science 2017, 358 (6363), p. 662; Jamie Woodward, The Ice Age: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 138-139, 141.
13. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 3.
14. Ibidem, p. 2; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 175-177; Philip Eichman, “The History, Biology & Medical Aspects of Leprosy”, The American Biology Teacher 1999, 61 (7), p. 491.
15. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 4.
16. Ibidem, p, 3; Mary Lewis, The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and Forensic Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 22.
17. Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, (Abbingdon: Andromeda, 1990), p. 14.
18. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p, 3.
19. Ibidem, p. 3-4; Andrew Chamberlain, “Commentary: Missing Stages Of Life – Towards the Perception of Children in Archaeology’” in: Jenny Moore & Eleanor Scott (eds.), Invisible People and Processes: Writing Gender and Childhood into European Archaeology (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997), p. 249.
20. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 5; Jane Baxter, The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2005), p. 7-10.
21. Jane Baxter, “Making Space for Children in Archaeological Interpretations”, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 2005, 15 (1), p. 78.
22. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 6.
23. Ibidem, p. 5-6.
24. Michael Schiffer, Behavioral Archaeology: Practices and Principles (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 40.
25. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 6.
26. Ibidem, p. 5.
27. Ibidem, p. 7.
28. Ibidem, p. 9-12.
29. Ibidem, p. 9.
30. Ibidem, p. 7; Sally Crawford, “The Archaeology of Play Things: Theorising a Toy Stage in the ‘Biography’ of objects”, Childhood Past 2009, 2 (1), p. 64.
31. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 12.
32. Erin Halstad McGuire, “‘Whim Rules the Child’: The Archaeology of Childhood in Scandinavian Scotland”, Journal of the North Atlantic 2019, 12 (special issue 11), p. 14; Helen Schwartzman, “Materializing Children: Challenges for the Archaeology of Childhood”, Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 2006, 15 (1), p. 127.
33. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 13.
34. Ibidem; Margaret Conkey, “Questioning Theory: Is There a Gender of Theory in Archaeology?”, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 2007, 14 (3), p. 291-294, 301-303.
35. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 14.
36. Ibidem, p. 13-14.
37. Ibidem, p. 13; Nancy Gonlin & April Nowell, “Introduction to the Archaeology of the Night”, in: Nancy Gonlin & April Nowell, Archeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2018), p. 5-6.
38. Glenn Storey, “All Rome Is at My Bedside: Nightlife in the Roman Empire”, in: Nancy Gonlin & April Nowell, Archeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2018), p. 308-331. For the popularity of true crime as a genre, see: Joy Wiltenburg, “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism”, The American Historical Review 2004, 109 (5), p. 1377-1404.
39. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 14.
40. Ibidem, p. iix, 13.
41. Woodward, The Ice Age.
42. Jane Baxter, The Archaeology of Childhood.
43. Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018)