The 1940s were a troubled decade in colonial Bengal which was ravaged by one calamity after another. While the Bengal famine of 1943 claimed lives and rendered many destitute, the relief and rescue of children in Bengal were not solely concentrated on those affected by famine, even if famine relief was an important agenda of diverse religious and secular organisations. Exploring two collections related to the rehabilitation and relief of children primarily in the 1940s in undivided Bengal, the article focuses on the presence of individual children in these records. Deploying a comparative framework, it discusses the methodological implications which arise from pursuing traces of historical children, particularly in such region-centric collections and from reflecting on the processes which make children visible in the archives.
Galer & iacute;a del S & iacute;lex, (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain), is a site of human occupation from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. This study presents 11 radiometric dates on human remains from the central area of the gallery, which date to the first third of the 3rd millennium BCE (pre-Bell Beaker). The assemblage represents an outstanding funerary space in European prehistory dedicated almost exclusively to young children, indicating a specific mortuary practice for this age group. This pattern may explain the scarcity of young children in other funerary contexts of the period and suggests that they held recognized social status within pre-Bell Beaker communities. Comparison with two contemporary sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca region shows continuous funerary use of caves for more than three centuries. Interestingly, each of the three caves exhibits distinct funerary practices, especially in the treatment of children, which may reflect social differences among the individuals interred.
Hippocrates' teachings exerted significant influence on Athenian intellectuals, notably on Plato, who drew extensively from Hippocratic treatises. This article examines how Plato integrates Hippocratic medical concepts to construct a physiology and anatomy of the soul, modelled on the somatic processes of childhood growth - particularly the phenomenon of dentition. Focusing on key passages from the Phaedrus, the study highlights Plato's intentional appropriation of physio-pathological terminology to describe the germination of the soul's wings. A detailed comparison with Hippocratic texts on teething reveals a shared medical lexicon used to depict both physical and psychic transformations, reflecting a continuity between body and soul. The comparison between dentition and the sprouting of the soul's wings illustrates how the soul's return to the hyperuranion mirrors bodily transitions from childhood to adulthood in both physical and cognitive terms. Childhood physiology serves as an epistemological model for philosophical thought, revealing ancient conceptions of childhood as a transformative stage.
Spending time in traditional non-Western economies helps to reduce reliance on modern perspectives. Based on informal interactions with children as I worked with their parents in Mongolia, Senegal and Australia, I offer some observations on their lives and economic roles. Unlike in Western cultures where adult work is frequently separate, in traditional societies, this tends to include children. Children still play of course, with an emphasis on role playing, but they also work. Parallels between different places include full contribution of children in adult subsistence and a well-developed knowledge of their environment. By around the age of six years, they are active economic contributors, participating in responsible tasks within a flexible approach that allows them to work according to their limitations, often using adult tools. The similar way in which children are treated as an integral part of economic and social structures in different places, in a way that is very different from today's Western world, is notable.
Craft books for children may give us insight into the children's culture of a certain era. With their typical combinations of pictures and instructive texts, they may appear to be of a purely technical nature and thus ideologically uninteresting. However, I will argue that they are definitely anchored in reality and refer to it, thus shaping children's world view. I will analyze two craft books from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in detail. In Bau mit uns (Build with us. Handicraft Products from Corrugated Cardboard, 1959), this is the reality of (re)building, and in Himmelsst & uuml;rmer Unser Flugzeug- und Raketenstartplatz von morgen (Heaven Strikers. Our Aircraft and Rocket Launching Site of Tomorrow, 1963), this is the reality of space travel, adding a utopian dimension. The images in these books implicitly refer to the visual culture of the GDR, thus providing a source for the reconstruction of GDR childhood.
This study examines whether Japanese prefectures with documented child labour in 1950s fishing villages show elevated rates of incomplete compulsory education. Using prefecture-level data from the 2020 National Population Census, this study focuses on adults who did not complete junior high school, relating these outcomes to historical evidence of long-term school absence associated with fisheries-based labour. Based on a systematic review, prefectures were classified into Group A, where absence was primarily linked to labour demands, and Group B, where labour was accompanied by documented trafficking practices. Group-level comparisons show that non-completion was higher than the national average (0.70%) among Group A men (0.89%) and Group B women (1.53%). At the prefectural level, particularly pronounced rates were observed among men in Hiroshima (4.25%) and women in Okinawa (5.66%), consistent with historically documented labour-related educational disruption. The study highlights the relevance of adult literacy and lifelong learning from a life-course perspective.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was rarely explored. Zacatecas, during the nineteenth century, offers a unique context because it was part of the liberal movement against the centralist government of Mexico, which allowed improvements in health and sanitation policies. However, the mining-based economy caused the stability and wealth of the population to fluctuate. It was identified through parish archives that 24 (2.3%) infant deaths under 1 year old (n = 1006) could be related to SIDS or accidents with the causes stated as: 'drowned by his mother', 'drowned', 'suffocation', 'overlapping', 'died suddenly', 'without air', 'broken', 'attack' and 'sucked by witches'. Ten individuals were female, while 14 were male, mostly under 5 months of age. Studying SIDS in Zacatecas helps to contextualize the stigma and legal or religious responses to infant mortality and to understand how families and institutions coped with unexplained deaths.
This study investigates the material and social dimensions of childhood among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers in the lower Paran & aacute; wetlands (Argentina). Drawing on archaeological, bioanthropological, and ethnographic evidence, it explores children's participation in daily subsistence activities and their mortuary treatment. The abundance of stable, predictable, and low-risk resources likely enabled children to contribute meaningfully to tasks such as fishing, small-game hunting, mollusc gathering, and plant collection. The settlement pattern, centred on long-term camps, may have facilitated their involvement by promoting deep knowledge of the surrounding environments. Mortuary practices show two distinct age-related patterns: children under six were typically buried in primary graves alongside adults, suggesting shared ritual significance, while individuals aged 10-20 years were more often placed in secondary burials. These patterns reflect nuanced social categorisations of non-adults and underscore the importance of integrating multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct childhood experiences and roles within pre-Columbian societies of the region.
Iconographic sources indicate that ear ornaments were so ubiquitous in ancient Maya society that it was an essential part of personhood, a status put into jeopardy when ornaments were removed in scenes of captivity and sacrifice. Previous studies of archaeological ear ornaments have largely focused on high-status adults, while few have considered their importance among children. This paper examines the piercing of infants' ears as a key rite of passage in the making of social persons in the Maya area. It examines Classic-period ceramic figurines, stone monuments, and painted representations of children and their developmental stages, and contextualizes them with ethnohistoric and ethnographic literature. This indicates that piercing the ears was one of the earliest rites of passage, often occurring before the wearing of gendered clothing. This paper also examines the stretching of the ear over time, making this ritual a long-winded process where social identity was constantly reworked.
The Scandinavian Viking Age maintains an enduring popularity, in popular culture and academic enquiry. It has also retained a tendency to showcase rather limited protagonists: adult male actors typically get the main share of attention. Children often become accessories in stories about adults, or adults-in-training. We challenge this one-sided and narrow story, first by accentuating existing research on Viking-age children, then by trying to fill the gaps by imagining how the world might have looked to children. Acknowledging that social divides created widely different childhood experiences we look to the writing of children's literature for ways of seeing the world through the eyes of children. The main objective is to encourage attempts to populate the Viking world with more diverse social agents through storytelling and narration, accepting that children formed and acted in the world around them as agents and not just furniture in the lives of adults.
Previous studies of bodily ornaments from burial contexts have often fixated on notions of wealth, social inequality, and prestige. Although such considerations are often pertinent, our work provides a complementary perspective incorporating Indigenous and ladino (mestizo) medical-spiritual understandings of bodily ornaments. We find that this perspective is best understood through a focus on children. In particular, this paper examines the marine shell, bone, ceramic, and stone bracelets and necklaces of children from Late and Terminal Classic burials at the Maya site of Ucanal, Pet & eacute;n, Guatemala, and compares them to burials from a range of time periods in the same region of the eastern Maya Lowlands. In addition, by incorporating ethnographic and ethnohistoric research on Indigenous Maya and ladino practices, we underscore the relational understandings of Maya ornaments worn by children and their role in the articulation of caring relations between parents and their precious children, in repelling spiritual forces and winds carrying illnesses, and in the making of social persons. While attention and respect for Indigenous medical-spiritual practices are slowly but increasingly recognized in contemporary medical practices in Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere, archaeological perspectives also benefit from such perspectives on children and their well-being.
We consider the interplay between Classic period (250-900 CE) Maya elite understandings of childness and humanness. By childness (as opposed to childhood) we emphasize the particular qualities of children as they were understood by Classic Maya elites. This in turn relates to humanness; what characterized humans as opposed to the non-human beings of the Classic Maya world. For the Classic Maya, one seems to have gained humanness over the course of childhood and adolescence. We especially consider how notions of childness and humanness pertained to violence in elite contexts. In their earlier years, some children were the subject of violence, perhaps because they were less human. As they gained their humanness with age they, somewhat paradoxically, were increasingly expected to become agents of violence in their own right. In building these arguments we draw on bioarchaeological data from elite contexts at the Maya sites of Lacanja Tzeltal and Tikal.
This special section examines ancient Maya childhood from the perspectives of relationality and relational ontologies. Relational approaches are useful for understanding childhood as they help move beyond the objective of only 'finding children' to underscore how children play a larger relational role in social, environmental, material, and cosmological worlds. Furthermore, the focus on children among these relational worlds provides critical perspectives on who and what can be considered human and how social persons come into being. The contributors engage, in particular, with Indigenous Maya ontologies in their examination of childhood as a foundational process in the making of social personhood.
This study presents a possible case of infantile cortical hyperostosis (ICH) in a 2.5-3.5-year-old individual from a twelth century Middle Byzantine burial context from Aphrodisias, T & uuml;rkiye. ICH, a rare inflammatory bone disease typically of infancy, is seldom identified archaeologically due to its transient nature. This individual exhibited asymmetrical periosteal new bone formation on the mandible, scapula, and the diaphyses of the ulna, humerus, and radius. Differential diagnosis considered pathological conditions such as haemolytic anaemias, scurvy, rickets, tuberculosis, and child abuse; however, the alterations are most consistent with ICH. This is the first known archaeological case from T & uuml;rkiye, contributing to discussions on infant health in Byzantine populations.
This study investigates infant burials (foetal to 3 years old) in early medieval Wallonia (seventh-twelfth centuries AD) through archaeothanatological analysis of two recently excavated urban religious sites: Li & egrave;ge (Notre-Dame-aux-Fonts) and Mons (Rampe Sainte-Waudru). Twenty-four individuals were examined for grave location, architecture, burial arrangement, age, and palaeopathology. Infants typically received careful funerary treatment, often in wooden or soft containers, mirroring that of older individuals. Occasional double burials with adults raise questions about familial and community relationships. Individuals aged 1-3 years are overrepresented, though incomplete excavations limit demographic interpretation. Biological status - age or health - did not appear to influence burial care; only two showed pathology, one possibly from birth trauma. The integration of these burials in key religious centres reflects infants' recognised social value within community. Findings enhance understanding of early medieval attitudes towards childhood and call for further study of the social and biological determinants of infant burial practices.
This study investigates adolescence in the early medieval period in Austria by combining historical, archaeological, genetic, and osteological data. To better understand adolescence in the Avar period (650-800 CE), we consulted early medieval inscriptions and historical sources on steppe peoples and correlated them to the osteological findings on the timing of development and the pubertal growth spurt from two Austrian sites. We found that non-specific stress indicators were useful in explaining some of the variance in the timing of the growth spurt, in the absence of severe chronic diseases. The distribution of pathological changes over the duration of adolescence illustrated potential changes in the roles and responsibilities of adolescents. Differences in inflammatory changes may reflect distinct living conditions of male and female adolescents.
