Last Comment Until 2006 on Toys:

Very good point. The discussion itself revealed many dimensions  to the 
question if "generally speaking", for this time period, boys are associated 
with marbles and girls with jacks. Archaeology works on patterns and 
probabilities, both contextual and specific to
individual sites, and general to given cultural systems. Children may 
follow "their own rules" but the key word is "rules."

"Archaeological context" is not a fad, in fact it has existed across the 
entire history of the discipline not just the last few decades. But the 
concept of culture as SHARED behavior and set of rules is also not a fad 
and it will also always be central to archaeological research. Such 
patterns, of course, are not static, absolute, or universal within a given 
system but they are patterns.

Finally, individuals are not nearly as complex, 'active agents", or as 
significant as many of us in Western society would like to believe.
                                                                 RLS

At 06:03 PM 11/2/2005, you wrote:
>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
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>http://www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/

Robert L. Schuyler
University of Pennsylvania Museum
3260 South Street
Philadelphia, PA l9l04-6324

Tel: (215) 898-6965
Fax: (215) 898-0657
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