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A CLOSER LOOK AT THE LIVELIHOODS OF 
CHILDREN IN THE PAST 
 
 
Review by Christopher E. Nicosia 

 
 

BOOK REVIEW:  Edited by Patrick Beauchesne & Sabrina C. Agarwal 
(2018). Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology. Gainesville: University Press of 
Florida. 

 
 

KEYWORDS: Mortuary Analysis, Children, Childhood, Biocultural, Bioarchaeology 
 
   
Over the last two decades, archaeologists and bioarchaeologists have been paying 
increasing attention to infants and children. Earlier views of children within the discipline 
have often portrayed them as being irrelevant to socioeconomic life in past societies. In 
addition to other contributing factors, such as poor skeletal preservation, adult-focused 
studies, and culturally-specific funerary practices influencing appearance rates in 
mortuary spaces, has often led towards their exclusion when investigating past cultures 
(e.g., Halcrow and Tayles 2011; Lewis 2007; Mays et al. 2017). However, with shifting 
views since the 1970’s and recent materializations of bringing nonadult-based research to 
forefront, it is progressively being recognized that children are active agents within their 
communities and that their funerary treatments can provide significant information 
towards biosocial contexts. They can inform a great deal about the cultures that they're a 
part of by extending interpretations of socio-cultural perceptions of age, gender, 
ideologies, and identities, and overall aid in the social reconstructions of ancient 
civilizations. The Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology volume edited by Patrick 
Beauchesne and Sabrina Agarwal highlights the importance of nonadult studies by 
bringing together a wide-range of bioarchaeological scholars who discuss biocultural, life 
history, and life-course approaches towards enriching children and childhood studies in 
antiquity that integrate socio-cultural, biological, and archaeological lines of evidence.   
 
The first part of the volume discusses the foundations of biocultural theory (i.e., the 
relationship between biological adaptations and cultural constructions that can affect 
human behavior) involving the concept of "childhood" – the life phase between birth and 



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adolescence. Bioarchaeologists Inglis and Halcrow open the first chapter with a review 
that explores life history and life-course theory towards social paleopathological and 
cultural factors that can influence a child's life, past and current theoretical positions on 
the study of children in bioarchaeology and the complexities of aging due to various 
social and biological components. They also highlight fields, such as sociology and social 
anthropology that are assisting in fostering studies of infants and children in past 
communities. The second and third chapters concentrate on mother-infant interface and 
feeding practices, such as breastfeeding and weaning. In the second chapter Pearson's 
impressive biocultural meta-analysis concentrates on the reconstruction of breastfeeding 
and weaning patterns in the archaeological records of 22 case studies from Europe, 
Eurasia, Southwest Asia, and Southeast Asia over the last 10,000 years to investigate the 
cultural plasticity of the weaning period. She discusses the biology of lactation to explore 
if humans have followed a fairly narrow "biological footprint" over the past 10,000 years 
or if culture had a greater effect on the variability of breastfeeding practices and fertility. 
Also, she discusses the incorporation of stable isotopes towards studying weaning 
practices. In Chapter 3, Moffat and Prowse compellingly advocate for expanding roles 
toward the study of children and infant feeding practices. They demonstrate how the 
investigation of feeding practices can illustrate social attitudes towards women and 
children, relationships with fertility and effects on populational health. 
 
The fourth and fifth chapters examine nonadult remains in the archaeological record of 
the Peruvian north coast to explore cultural constructions of childhood and their 
involvements during incidents of violence. In Chapter 4, Klaus provides an important 
synthesis of the cultural construction of childhood in the Lambayeque region of Peru’s 
north coast from 1000 BC to AD 1750 by integrating bioarchaeological, funerary pattern 
and contextual data derived from a sample of nearly 900 subadults. His findings provide 
insight into cultural practices (e.g., ritual offerings or sacrifice) that shaped cultural 
constructions of childhood and how childhood perceptions in the Lambayeque area may 
have changed following Spanish colonization. In Chapter 5, Toyne offers a look into 
understanding episodes of violence against children of pre-Hispanic Peru by conducting 
detailed comparative reviews of three populations each exhibiting over 100 individuals 
(nonadults = 50–60%). Overall, the author's theoretical approach presented a valuable 
examination on the intersections of traces of violence and biological age to explore social 
age (i.e., the embodiment of socially constructed norms concerning appropriate behavior 
and attitudes for an age group) and personhood at sites Túcume, Punta Lobos, and 
Kuelap.  
 
The second part of the volume focuses on life history (i.e., series of changes undergone 
during an individual’s lifetime) and life-course (i.e., a multi-disciplinary approach for the 
conceptualization and representation of age-related changes in an individual’s life) 
approaches for examining human history and developmental stages through the analyses 
of human skeletal remains. In Chapter 6, Gosman, Raichlen, and Ryan review the current 
state of fundamental knowledge on skeletal development to examine possible 
relationships with childhood behavioral development and skeletal microstructure, 
specifically trabecular and cortical bone. They present a convincing argument where 
having a more refined understanding of skeletal developmental variations can aid in 



 

identifying deviations from expected patterns of growth in the past. The piece unpacks 
useful strategies for researchers interested in skeletal development and refinement of life-
course approaches towards biological and cross-cultural variability. Chapter 7 by Temple 
focuses on the transition between infancy and childhood of prehistoric foragers of the 
late/final Jomon period in Japan through a paleopathological dental examination of linear 
enamel hypoplasia (LEH) and mortuary practices. Despite a small sample size (n=32) of 
individuals with observable perikymata due to unavoidable taphonomic factors, the 
biocultural analysis illustrates that LEH developed the most between the period of 
socially determined childhood and ecologically determined childhood and provided an 
important discussion of physiological stress and its effects over the life-course of a 
nonadult.  
 
Chapter 8 by Miller, Agarwal, and Langebaek provide a life-course study on stable 
isotopic food consumption of the pre-Colonial Muisca culture of Colombia. They conduct 
a comparative analysis by sampling multiple bone and dental tissues in the same 
individuals to reflect different formation stages of diet across the life cycle. From this, 
they track food consumption from childhood into adulthood and connections with 
"gendered" food consumption. Their data suggest that "gendered" maize consumption 
began in early childhood and persisted into adulthood. In Chapter 9, Gowland and 
Newman examine the eighteenth and nineteenth-century industrial revolution in Britain 
to see how children embodied inequalities and how these experiences early in life can 
shape health and well-being. This is done through the analysis of four-centimeter 
longitudinal bone growth, nonspecific stress indicators, LEH, and the application of 
developmental plasticity models and epigenetics for new alternative interpretations. The 
chapter demonstrates the value of multiple methods and theoretical approaches. 
 
In the last chapter, Wheeler, Williams, and Dupras study the nature of shifting Egyptian 
ideologies and social attitudes toward children during a period of transition to Christian 
beliefs. They explore these shifts through burial practices and health reconstructions done 
with multiple lines of evidence (e.g., nonspecific stress indicators, trauma, and stable 
isotopes) involving a nonadult skeletal sample from the Egyptian Kellis 2 township 
population located in Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt. This cogent chapter highlights the roles 
mortuary archaeology can have on childhood reconstructions in bioarchaeology when 
combining bioarchaeological techniques with ethnohistorical contexts. The one issue in 
the chapter involves the comparison of stress marker relationships between nonadults to 
adults as it can present difficulties since nonadults exhibit higher pathological cell 
turnover rates that can occur during periods of growth.  
 
In sum, the editors of Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology deserve praise for 
crafting a vital multidisciplinary volume that provides essential information on the study 
of nonadults in past cultures. They brought together an excellent and well-rounded group 
of researchers from different bioarchaeological backgrounds that have contributed greatly 
towards the discussions of nonadult research. High quality figures, graphs, and tables 
throughout help in the presentation of data. The volume should be on the list of 
archaeologists, historians, and biological anthropologists interested in child studies. It 
will surely prove useful for upper-division courses as it not only demonstrates various 



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approaches towards researching children in the past but also presents temporal, cultural, 
and global perspectives on the human experience. 
 

 
References  

 
Halcrow, S. E., & Tayles, N. (2011). The Bioarchaeological Investigation Of Children 
And Childhood. In Social Bioarchaeology (eds L. Meskell, R.A. Joyce, S.C. Agarwal and 
B.A. Glencross). Pp. 333-360. doi:10.1002/9781444390537.ch12 
 
Lewis, M. (2007). The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from Biological and 
Forensic Anthropology (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary 
Anthropology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511542473 
 
Simon Mays, Rebecca Gowland, Siân Halcrow & Eileen Murphy. (2017). Child 
Bioarchaeology: Perspectives on the Past 10 Years, Childhood in the Past, 10:1, 38-
56, doi: 10.1080/17585716.2017.1301066 
 

 
Christopher Nicosia is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Louisiana State University. 
His dissertation topic currently involves looking at Peruvian subadult mortuary 
treatments (e.g., grave goods, body placement, body orientation, etc.) with biological 
components, such as biological sex and pathologies, to piece together aspects of their 
social identity (e.g., personhood, sex-roles, gender) and to better understand their roles in 
past communities. He has an interest in the topics of looking at societal aspects of social 
identity (e.g., personhood, adulthood, gender) and care regarding perceptions of cared 
individuals and paleopathological influences on mortuary treatments emphasized through 
funerary practices. This is an outgrowth of his interests in aspects of mortuary practices, 
violence, paleopathology, diet, and social landscapes. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

© 2020 Christopher Nicosia 
 
 


