Many thanks to Mary Beaudry for her useful bibliography of recent 
interpretive work in the historical archaeology of childhood. Such work 
underlines the importance of life-stages and -histories, encouraging us to 
imagine the people whose remains we encounter as more than static 
individuals, in the prime of life. Historical archaeology is playing an 
increasingly important role in archaeological work in this field -- 
especially through book-length studies like Laurie Wilkie's Archaeology of 
Mothering (Routledge 2003).

Unlike Mary, my own surprise at the thread derives not from the many 
contributions of personal memories of childhood which this thread has 
elicited, but from the rather odd suggestion that contextual approaches in 
archaeology represent a 'fad'. We are, after all, 37 years on from David 
Clarke's Analytical Archaeology, and some 20 years on from Hodder's 
Reading the Past... Indeed, it is notable that the original question in 
this thread --

"Would you agree that GENERALLY speaking: Marbles = little boys, "Jacks" 
=  little girls"

-- has in fact led away from such normative concerns to a discussion that 
has highlighted the highly complex, richly textured and diverse ways in 
which people experience and remember the material culture of childhood. 

After all (in our household at least!), kids tend to follow their own 
rules...

Dan
..................
Dr Dan Hicks
Archaeology & Anthropology
University of Bristol
[log in to unmask]
http://www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/