This edited volume showcases the work of leading and emerging scholars in the relatively new field of bioarchaeology of children. Bioarchaeological studies of children (including all subadults), until recently, have mainly focused on topics like mortality rates, growth, morbidity, and weaning ages. However, children are more than simply demographic variables and indicators of growth and health patterns. This volume intends to redress this by including case studies that address more nuanced topics of children and ideology (The Chosen Child), children and power (The Desecrated Child), children a ... More

This edited volume showcases the work of leading and emerging scholars in the relatively new field of bioarchaeology of children. Bioarchaeological studies of children (including all subadults), until recently, have mainly focused on topics like mortality rates, growth, morbidity, and weaning ages. However, children are more than simply demographic variables and indicators of growth and health patterns. This volume intends to redress this by including case studies that address more nuanced topics of children and ideology (The Chosen Child), children and power (The Desecrated Child), children as economic actors or capital (The Working Child), and children's identity/personhood (The Cultured Child). Cross-cutting these themes are topics of gender, agency, violence, and health. Each of these themes provides ways of viewing data collected on infants, children, juveniles, and adolescents (all subadults) within a variety of theoretical frameworks. This work demonstrates that there are many ways to approach the interpretation of the data that can be collected from immature skeletons. While immature individuals (sometimes referred to collectively as children) should and can be used to assess the degree of successful adaptation of a particular population to their environments, these chapters also showcase how subadults can be assessed as individuals in their own right and to give the reader examples of different ways of thinking about children and other immature individuals in historic and prehistoric contexts, how to test hypotheses about the interaction between culture and biology, as well as how to frame questions about the nature and quality of children's lives.