Children and innovation: A Wenner‐Gren workshop

Abstract

Thirty years ago, Grete Lillehammer1 published her seminal paper, A Child is Born, which many archeologists saw as a call to arms to meaningfully integrate children into archeological inquiries. In the intervening decades, there has been a slow but steady uptake in child‐focused studies in archeology. A survey of articles published in 14 mainstream journals in anthropology produced in the first 25 years since Lillehammer's article found that of the more than 14,000 articles published, only just under 400 could be considered “child‐focused.” Close to 60% of these articles centered on growth and development, morphology, the identification of disease, breastfeeding, and weaning; 15% concerned burial practices and aging and sexing skeletal material; and 10% derived primarily from the nonhuman primate literature. Only a few percentages of the articles were devoted to archeological perspectives on the lived lives of children.